UnlearningSilence.blog

My taste in music has never been orderly. I listen to hip hop, R&B, jazz, soul, electronic music, Afrobeat, classical music, pop, folk music from places I have never visited and songs in languages I do not understand. Perhaps this openness began in childhood, when music arrived slowly and unpredictably. There were no streaming services or endless libraries waiting behind a screen. Songs passed from one person to another on cassette tapes copied so many times that the sound sometimes seemed to come from very far away. We listened to whatever reached us. We waited for it, shared it and guarded it carefully. Scarcity gave music a kind of weight.

I still remember borrowing a portable music player from a friend and hearing a pop song through headphones during a school break. The song itself is less important than what happened when it began. The ordinary world suddenly seemed brighter and larger, as though a door had opened onto a life I had not yet imagined. When I eventually saved enough money to buy a player of my own, my collection was small and wonderfully inconsistent. None of it belonged together except that I had chosen it. I would finish my work, close the door and disappear into sound. When the house felt unsettled, music gave me somewhere else to be. It was not only an escape. It was one of my earliest experiences of freedom.

For a long time, I loved music more easily than I inhabited my own body. I wanted to dance but had no natural confidence and little opportunity to learn, so I found informal ways to teach myself. I watched other people, copied what I could and practised privately until movement stopped feeling like a performance I was failing. Eventually, my body became something more than the practical means by which I moved through the day. It became expressive. Music had given my imagination somewhere to go. Dance gave the rest of me a way to follow.

As I grew older, music became inseparable from people. Friends and partners introduced me to sounds, rooms and traditions I might never have found alone. Through one person, I discovered the pleasure of a communal dance in which strangers joined hands and moved together. What mattered was not whether anyone danced beautifully. Once the music began, the distinctions that usually organised a room seemed to loosen. Age, wealth, education and origin became temporarily irrelevant. Everyone entered the same rhythm. Some of the greatest gifts people have given me were invitations into worlds that had always existed beyond the borders of my own experience.

One of those gifts arrived during a lonely period in an unfamiliar place. I knew someone quiet who spent much of his time listening to music and who gradually began sharing it with me. Before he left, he gave me a music player and a collection of albums he had chosen and recorded himself. The object was modest, but at the time it felt immensely valuable. There are people who help a newcomer understand practical things, and there are people who quietly make the unfamiliar feel inhabitable. That collection seemed to say that there was room for me here too. I doubt he knew how much his kindness mattered. Perhaps the gestures that remain with us longest are often the ones the giver considered small.

Other people led me into crowded dance floors, intimate jazz rooms, live performances and summer afternoons spent outdoors with music drifting through conversation. Each setting had its own rituals and its own crowd, yet beneath the differences people appeared to be looking for much the same things: connection, expression, joy and the temporary freedom to become more fully themselves. Someone taught me that music need not be treated as decoration. A song could belong to a place, a conversation or the particular quality of light on an ordinary afternoon. It could turn an experience into a memory before the experience had even ended. I eventually bought a portable speaker of my own. It still accompanies me, although the person who inspired the habit no longer does.

For years, I treated endings as evidence that something had failed. We are encouraged to measure relationships by their duration, as though only permanence can prove that an experience mattered. I no longer believe this. People can leave and still have changed the way we hear, move, think or notice the world. A relationship need not continue indefinitely for something valuable to have passed through it. This does not require romanticising the past or pretending that painful behaviour was acceptable. It means allowing gratitude and disappointment to occupy the same memory without forcing either one to cancel the other.

Perhaps maturity is the ability to keep what was given without needing to keep the person who gave it. A song can remain after the conversation has ended. A dance can outlive the hands that first guided it. A lesson can become part of a life long after the relationship that delivered it has reached its limit. Some people taught me courage. Some taught me boundaries. Some showed me what affection could be, while others clarified what it must never require. Many left behind music. I can value what entered my life through them without wishing to return to the life in which it arrived.

When I look back, I do not see a neat collection of successes and failures. I hear a soundtrack assembled by accident. There are songs that contain rooms I have not entered for years and versions of myself I had almost forgotten. A few notes can return me to the first borrowed headphones, the first private dance, an unfamiliar place becoming less foreign or an ordinary afternoon becoming important simply because someone knew what music to play. The memory may contain joy, grief or both. Music does not ask me to choose.

Music has never prevented anything from ending. It has done something kinder. It has allowed what was worth keeping to survive the ending. The song finishes. What it changed in us does not.My taste in music has never been orderly. I listen to hip hop, R&B, jazz, soul, electronic music, Afrobeat, classical music, pop, folk music from places I have never visited and songs in languages I do not understand. Perhaps this openness began in childhood, when music arrived slowly and unpredictably. There were no streaming services or endless libraries waiting behind a screen. Songs passed from one person to another on cassette tapes copied so many times that the sound sometimes seemed to come from very far away. We listened to whatever reached us. We waited for it, shared it and guarded it carefully. Scarcity gave music a kind of weight.

I still remember borrowing a portable music player from a friend and hearing a pop song through headphones during a school break. The song itself is less important than what happened when it began. The ordinary world suddenly seemed brighter and larger, as though a door had opened onto a life I had not yet imagined. When I eventually saved enough money to buy a player of my own, my collection was small and wonderfully inconsistent. None of it belonged together except that I had chosen it. I would finish my work, close the door and disappear into sound. When the house felt unsettled, music gave me somewhere else to be. It was not only an escape. It was one of my earliest experiences of freedom.

For a long time, I loved music more easily than I inhabited my own body. I wanted to dance but had no natural confidence and little opportunity to learn, so I found informal ways to teach myself. I watched other people, copied what I could and practised privately until movement stopped feeling like a performance I was failing. Eventually, my body became something more than the practical means by which I moved through the day. It became expressive. Music had given my imagination somewhere to go. Dance gave the rest of me a way to follow.

As I grew older, music became inseparable from people. Friends and partners introduced me to sounds, rooms and traditions I might never have found alone. Through one person, I discovered the pleasure of a communal dance in which strangers joined hands and moved together. What mattered was not whether anyone danced beautifully. Once the music began, the distinctions that usually organised a room seemed to loosen. Age, wealth, education and origin became temporarily irrelevant. Everyone entered the same rhythm. Some of the greatest gifts people have given me were invitations into worlds that had always existed beyond the borders of my own experience.

One of those gifts arrived during a lonely period in an unfamiliar place. I knew someone quiet who spent much of his time listening to music and who gradually began sharing it with me. Before he left, he gave me a music player and a collection of albums he had chosen and recorded himself. The object was modest, but at the time it felt immensely valuable. There are people who help a newcomer understand practical things, and there are people who quietly make the unfamiliar feel inhabitable. That collection seemed to say that there was room for me here too. I doubt he knew how much his kindness mattered. Perhaps the gestures that remain with us longest are often the ones the giver considered small.

Other people led me into crowded dance floors, intimate jazz rooms, live performances and summer afternoons spent outdoors with music drifting through conversation. Each setting had its own rituals and its own crowd, yet beneath the differences people appeared to be looking for much the same things: connection, expression, joy and the temporary freedom to become more fully themselves. Someone taught me that music need not be treated as decoration. A song could belong to a place, a conversation or the particular quality of light on an ordinary afternoon. It could turn an experience into a memory before the experience had even ended. I eventually bought a portable speaker of my own. It still accompanies me, although the person who inspired the habit no longer does.

For years, I treated endings as evidence that something had failed. We are encouraged to measure relationships by their duration, as though only permanence can prove that an experience mattered. I no longer believe this. People can leave and still have changed the way we hear, move, think or notice the world. A relationship need not continue indefinitely for something valuable to have passed through it. This does not require romanticising the past or pretending that painful behaviour was acceptable. It means allowing gratitude and disappointment to occupy the same memory without forcing either one to cancel the other.

Perhaps maturity is the ability to keep what was given without needing to keep the person who gave it. A song can remain after the conversation has ended. A dance can outlive the hands that first guided it. A lesson can become part of a life long after the relationship that delivered it has reached its limit. Some people taught me courage. Some taught me boundaries. Some showed me what affection could be, while others clarified what it must never require. Many left behind music. I can value what entered my life through them without wishing to return to the life in which it arrived.

When I look back, I do not see a neat collection of successes and failures. I hear a soundtrack assembled by accident. There are songs that contain rooms I have not entered for years and versions of myself I had almost forgotten. A few notes can return me to the first borrowed headphones, the first private dance, an unfamiliar place becoming less foreign or an ordinary afternoon becoming important simply because someone knew what music to play. The memory may contain joy, grief or both. Music does not ask me to choose.

Music has never prevented anything from ending. It has done something kinder. It has allowed what was worth keeping to survive the ending. The song finishes. What it changed in us does not.