Late at Night

Late at night I’m listening to music. I’m not writing. I’m not reading. I’m not searching authors and literary awards. I’m not thinking about how to approach my next story—what story should be told, what it means to me, why it matters.

I’m listening to music. The oldest of the music that changed me forever, made me want to cling for dear life to whatever I knew, whatever I had at the time to understand why the life I live would mean something to myself and others who would share my oxygen.

I went two years without listening to music. The sound of it, the sound—sound—hurt too much. That thing that I had learned for decades how to channel. Sound being more than what ears hear, but what minds crave. When my mind, because of music, escaped me, sound began to destroy me. Not music, but sound all by itself begging to be organized into something that could speak.

And now that I write, sound is all I can form into sentences. Words have started to escape me yet hold me hostage. I wanted words to free me and now all I can write is harmony. What does it sound like, is all I can ask when I write a sentence. What does it sound like?

I remember when sound eviscerated me, scraped my insides down to only blood vessels, no organs to pump my blood. Sound made me weak—more than weak: skeletal. I was defeated, humiliated, dehumanized by what I had for years waged war against and conquered.

Now—right now—and also the now of so many nights past, I yearn, sacrifice on the altar for my ability to hear the words that form in my skeletal psyche. I gain all control then lose it over and over again when a sound sizzles and steams above my consciousness. It doesn’t need me anymore; it waits for me to come to it, slows down for me to catch it, reach for it, slam it down under my palms and stomp it under my feet.

And I do. I do trample it. I shatter it into shards reflecting slices of myself sharp on every edge, prickling my skin at the touch of them with barely visible sprinkles of blood where the callouses on my hands once formed.

Words are for speaking. I’m tired of hearing my own voice. Late at night, I want to sit still. I want to listen.

Part I: Boom!

When I reveal to some people who don’t already know I’m bipolar because of all my blabbing about it, I have to explain how I deal with crushing episodes of depression. And then they jump back ten feet. Because I’m always smiling and always making someone else smile. How is that? How is it that I put a smile on everyone else’s face, but can’t put a smile on my own?

I seem to have two energies. One is a clean energy–wide-eyed and bushy -tailed with pure innocence–the other is determined to terminate my existence in every possible way. I’m surrounded by clean energy. Good friends, even better family, in spite of rough patches, fulfilling employment, constant ability to eat food and sleep in a warm house, on a warm bed, the ability to engage in life-changing conversation and the word of God as the stabilizing blessing that holds all of it together.

It’s not depicted and managed by the people or things around me. It’s my energy, my approach. Somehow, some way, I always provoke positive energy.

A week or so ago, a friend of mine–a pilot in the air force–explained to me the intricacy of the Sonic Boom: the transition in which a jet breaks the speed of sound resulting in a thunderous clap. At that point, the jet is moving faster than the rate at which sound waves vibrate. Sound waves. I should know all about sound waves. But I don’t. As a musician, I should have been able to discuss the ins and outs of those frequencies with him and the point at which those frequencies “break”. But I couldn’t. I knew nothing about it. And yet something about this aspect of flying drew me in like a stripper to a pole.

It’s sound. What the hell is sound if it’s not the medium with which I create? Why wouldn’t I know a thing about the very concept that breathes air into my musical lungs?

So I seem to know how to bring smiles to everyone’s face but my own. Strangely, being depressed should make me more, not less, knowledgeable about happiness. I know everything about it–I do–and yet I know nothing at all of what it really feels like.

If I can figure out how sound “breaks,” maybe I’ll start to understand.