You never know what a quiet Saturday will bring

Do you remember when the world was fresh and new? When you believed you were the only person who felt emboldened by a song heard for the first time? When there was so much more ahead of you than behind you? When all that you could only imagine in the future was more thrilling than terrifying? When you believed there was more out there for you, and that you would indeed grab it? When you hadn't discovered love but you could taste the sweet, dripping juices of its possibility?

I had forgotten. For a long damn time. But yesterday I walked right into it in the form of a used record shop in Ann Arbor with the boys. I saw music on vinyl that had given birth to how the world sounds to me--yet I'd forgotten. I bought obscure cds from alternative bands (when alternative existed--before Nirvana) that I'd listened to before I could drive on cassette so many times that the tape squeaked louder than the singer sang. But I hadn't thought of that music for fifteen years. I put the cds on for the drive home, and I was right back in my bedroom with my headphones on singing every angst-laden lyric by heart.

I had forgotten that budding young person--her intense sense of wonder, her unshakable belief that a glorious undiscovered world was holding something beautiful just for her and that if she could hold out, she'd find it and escape the desperate isolation of that second-floor bedroom and days filled with monotony and school hallways packed with narrowly-lived lives that wouldn't dare fathom the expansive imagination of her interior world.

I had let all that go. Why? Partly because I've grown up, I've found what I had dreamed of--quite literally in some cases, and I've become accustomed to living outside of awe. I don't fear who I am anymore; I'm not afraid of being too much in the context of others. In my life these days I'm quite often the loudest, most-laughing, chatty, charming person with the best shoes on in the room. I'm usually in charge, and if I'm not, I often think I should be; therefore, I find a way to lead the way.

But there was a long stretch there when--unbeknownst to me--I gave up on myself. I let an Other take over; I provided a stage in which he could shine, and I submitted to his sense of the ways things should be, even when they didn't jive with mine. I straightened my hair. I quit leaving my car to idle in the summertime at red lights to run through sprinklers on the side of the road. I changed out of my pajamas to go get ice cream after dinner. I let him control the stereo. He became the maestro of the soundtrack of my life. I willed discovery to him. I let him be right, even when no one was wrong.

And yet one foot into a dusty old used record shop brought me a couple of steps closer to the dreamy world that lay the foundation for the sumptuous life I now lead. Closer to me.

Reclamation number 167,892: rediscovering my music.

"The judges of normality are present everywhere."--Michel Foucault