face the music

and songs are like cues or keys, and when seasons begin, music bears layers of years and anxious nostalgia. i hear a song from some other spring, and it transports me with this wincing shock of memory, sharp and sudden and bittersweet. one year ago we sat on the roof in windy sun, drinking gas station wine with ice cubes from coffee mugs. i woke up early every morning to lie in the grass under the epic white trees on the oval, paging through dubliners and mrs.dalloway with a hand over my heart. and two years ago, somehow, was spring in dijon, walking the streets in this ecstacy of warmth and green, and everything suddenly alive. we spread blankets on the grass and sat in our worldly circles, planning and chainsmoking, sundizzy and deliriously content. songs appear like apparitions when i comb backwards through catalogues of marches and aprils, but i never make conclusions anymore. we cannot have a final say, we can never access time that is gone. we can connect dots and tell it all like one long story, but with distance and time and meandering retrospect, the past crystallizes until it is contained in one single song, and then somehow every flicker of some long-gone season comes spilling out to wash over us in the spots where we stand.