Songs Or Maybe Something Else

This has been repeated time and time again, and it probably doesn’t matter what I am going to talk about because you already know it. But still, I am going to talk about it. Because I want to.

This may be about songs. Their beauty. How much they can mean to someone, how much they can hide behind them. The depth of the lyrics, the soothing rhythms, and the anxiously calming silences that follow. All of it. But no. I will not keep it that general. This is a very specific quality that I want to discuss. The way songs hide memories inside them.

So it's been about 6 months since I came back from college to home. To be honest, I was missing it a little but not really thinking about it much. But now, after listening to a 6 songs long playlist, everything is fresh in my memory. Everything. Every walk I took with these songs in my ears. Every place I visited for the first time. The people who suggested me these songs, how I met these people for the first time, the bus journeys on which I heard these songs, the multiple meals I had while listening to these songs in a corner of our college mess, the multiple programming sessions in lab humming the tunes of these songs and getting interrupted by friends sitting next to me as it disturbed them. Everything.

I don't think we ever realise how much a song can mean to us. The way a song can describe everything you have ever felt, the way it can undergo evolution in its interpretation as you listen to it multiple times over the years, the way they can lift your mood, or allow it to fall when you need it; it is much more than and yet complete in itself, pure beauty of words decorated with enchanting music.

But sometimes the lyrics have nothing to do with the memory it is bonded with. The song is as special to us as the memory attached. I think a song is a type of time capsule. And maybe there are others too. Maybe a book that your father read to you, every time you got sick, or a game that you played every time the exams got over and you finally had your parent's permission to use the computer for games, or maybe the shop that you visited every second school day with your friends, eating Rs 5 patis and seeing its price go from 5 to 6 to 8 to 10 in front of you as you grew. Maybe anything that triggers memories is in fact, a time capsule. And as we grow we collect more and more of these capsules.

So when a famous writer said that a place exists nowhere but in the eyes of the people, maybe this is what he meant. These places we visit, the books we read, the songs we hear, and every other thing that we consider non-living; maybe they are all alive, as alive as you and me. These places that we have, maybe it's nothing but a part of our life that we keep in there. A part that keeps the place alive. And when we finally revisit them, we get to see these places come alive. Shadows of our younger selves roaming around with much less to look in the shadows and much more to look forward to. Everything visible to exclusively our eyes.

These places breathe with the lives of not only you or me but countless other people who found their life in them. Some found their solace, some found their salvation, while some broke down right in the middle of these places for something beautiful to be rebuilt over time. Some found their humdrum lives inside these places, and yet some saw the narrative changing over time.

So as long as we keep a part of our lives in these places, hidden under the old fountain in the park, engraved in the walls of the twelfth standard classroom, pressed between the pages of an old book; they continue to breathe the air of existence no matter where we are. And a journey that leaves such exquisite bonds of life in its path, now wouldn't that make for a beautiful story in itself?