Photo Credit: Bullshit Dreams
I turned the small square box over in my hands, opening it to reveal a flash of chrome – edges sparkling under artificial and well positioned in-store lighting.
Tucked inside were a pair of headphones. When in use, they provided brilliant highs and deep lows, subtle mids and sweeping, shimmering ranges.
If we’re all turning into cyborgs, these small pieces of aluminum would be a critical component to my core composition.
Because you see, music is a constant in my life. It accompanied me on either coast, whether in Boston or Santa Monica as I ran along the water at dusk. As I roamed the streets of Paris. As I passed out drunk on a plane during a last minute trip to Buenos Aires or more typically, to or from Austin.
Since moving to New York City I put in earbuds maybe half a dozen times during the day.
I craved the arrangements that made one’s heart soar or dive into the deepest of wells; the changes in key that shattered everything I knew or winked at the world with the most enduring grin.
Music supports and synthesizes every emotional state, including escapism.
The ability to go under headphones and hide from everything else.
Yet sometimes life happens, and the headphones need to be removed. Then the only sounds you hear are static-y and white – too noisy to be drowned out, too important to be paused or skipped ahead.
This is how I found myself fidgeting at the end of a line, fully understanding a trade that had to be made.
How predictable, how bourgeois.
How equally bourgeois that I happened to be at Bang & Olufsen.
Is it totally insane to sacrifice hobbies for the people we love, or is it a prerequisite to a larger gain?
I was returning the headphones because I needed the money. I wanted to fly him home with me to meet my family over Thanksgiving break.
Sometimes, relationship-altering moments come down to a solitary decision. A three dimensional move hanging in space, sometimes filled with hot air but usually, typically, more significant in comparison to the rest.
“We won’t be together for Thanksgiving or Christmas,” he said.
If I want to make this work I should pick one, I thought.
We decided to have Thanksgiving with his parents on the east coast, then fly to Cleveland the next morning for the long weekend.
I wanted to bring him there because for one, the level of predictability within my family is steady. It provides proof that I’m not too messed up and come from a place of relative normalcy.
Two, my sister had just announced her engagement. While we all paid attention to her and my future brother-in-law, some pressure would be lifted from the act of bringing home my boyfriend for the very first time.
That’s when we circle back to the rules. The things we must sacrifice in pursuit of the qualities of an ideal relationship. Ideally, these qualities set us up for the long term – unwavering commitment, support, trust, and love.
However, in subscribing to the $200 idea that this will arrive with the exchange of something personal, I missed the point that there were other things we needed to work on instead.
At that time, real responsibility had set in. The kind that occurs after a mind-numbing day of work. I found myself returning to our loft to act as pleasant as possible, void of things I’d normally do to restore myself like listen to music.
I was also sober to the reality of trying to make it at a new job in a new city while getting to know someone I never really knew in the first place.
I didn’t know who I was anymore either. I was lost in an aural sea of trying to please another person, one who drifted further away in subtle ways only I could tell.
This is what we do.
Should I even date someone who doesn’t understand my relationship with Belle and Sebastian?
And if I even met Stuart Murdoch himself would there be any mutual understanding, like at all?
I wonder if maybe sometimes we’re attracted to product packaging rather than its contents.
A month later he presented me with noise-canceling headphones for Christmas. I wore them on a flight back to Ohio, this time alone. On the surface they were simply a material object but my unique personal space was soon re-discovered within. Right where I had left it, in all its high-fi glory.
Whether he knew it or not, part of me had been restored.
We broke up about a year later. Two years and four months into the relationship.
I was nowhere to be found. I was still lost in the effort of tiptoeing around issues that the finest songwriters capture and the notes can help you to better understand.
The feedback came and left in waves.
I don’t wear headphones much anymore. My taste has changed. The music I listen to is more abstract. I’ve turned down the volume in an effort to better hear myself and those around me. It’s all there now, just in a more evolved state.
And I know to bring this with me wherever I go.
Wherever that place may be, within that, I am home.