Some music is just for the cold. Or just for the heat. Or for somewhere in between but not for both. A.A. Williams is like that. I feel like when I play Williams' music I conjure wintertide and the trees crowd down close to listen near me, weighted by the snow. Monday marks the end of Yule for us. Though the Christmas adornments are long put away and we are obsessed with the minutes of the sun in attendance (7:54 to 4:48 now, we're getting so close to an acceptable amount), the absolute end of Christmas season is marked for us by Burns Night (this coming Monday) when we kill the power entirely on the main level and cook over the fire (outside if possible), read the poems of Lochlan's favourite Scottish wordsmith and toast, with our whiskeys held high in the firelight, to a simpler, romantic time. It's a fun ritual to mark the end of winterval, what we call it when we are finished with it and ready to move on to spring, ready to move on to a quiet, warm spell where the coyotes and the owls shut the fuck up already and let the birds sing their most beautiful songs.
I have all my ingredients for the meal this year without scrambling. I'm so proud of myself for remembering but remember I have my big fancy planner and I write everything in it that needs to be done and I'm so organized I should be running the military from this steep crag above the ocean. A semi-benevolent antihero in a dress. The tiny reprobate witch with faltering power. The hopeful romantic.
I would order them to drop their weapons and push the snow clouds away. I would order them to stand at the ready and fix my fears. To keep things running smoothly without these endless cogs in the gears. Sometimes I panic so much I can't breathe. They send me out in the cold with a scout to watch over me, to listen to music in the wind, my orders to feel better tumbling like stones in the surface until they are smooth and ordinary and I can't pick them out from the crowd. It doesn't work but for a little while.
Then I get caught up in chores or painting or this music and I forget about life for a little while. The small things can be piled into a mountain, for sure and then I look around and realize no one else is standing in front of this mountain, they have views as far as the eyes can see.
I am blind to that and instead of focusing on the view my eyes are veiled with panic and pressure and surprise and I need to just follow their lead.
As always.
Follow them up the street. Follow them through the woods. Follow them into the dark. Follow them through the years. Follow their paths, cut through the easy parts so that I can do it. Shadow them close and instructed and things will be okay. They make it seem easy, why isn't it easy for me? It's a white-knuckle insurmountable ride but I seem to be doing it, in spite of the ache in my hands and the fear in my heart, hardly blanketed by the snow that quiets the screams inside my head.
Hey Lochlan.
Mmmmm?
Did you turn off the fog machine? (<-- That's codespeak for asking if he cut the amount of drugs I'm being given for My Own Benefit, something I have very publically begged them to do.)
Possibly. He winks. Not sure why we celebrate the start of the panic and the emotional tidal waves that just never quit but they sure beat the Nothingness instead. I wish we could somehow fix it down to a thirty-seventy split but this shit is not an exact science and I refuse to be a science experiment.
(Also, in writing this, even as I learned that I'm not all that medicated currently, I worked my way from A.A. Williams down to Bon Jovi and now we are about to sing Bed Of Roses at the top of our lungs. As we always have because it requires a full performance. God, being twenty-one and having this song hit the radio was just the greatest thing EVER at one point. Awesomely, it still is.
Music is the drug that works. Trust me on that.
I told you, Ben whispers against my head so hard it hurts. I press back and he kisses my hair. Welcome back, monstergirl.
Pfft. Wasn't my idea to check out like that.