Twenty-Five and Thirty-Nine

There's a song I play on bad days.

I played it at twenty-five. I play it now, at thirty-nine. It's the same song. Same time signature. Same bridge that always trips me up.

What's different is what I can do with it.

Twenty-Five

At twenty-five, I lived in an apartment with a drum kit in the corner.

The drum kit collected dust. I'd set it up when I moved in and then stopped touching it. Every time I looked at it, I remembered the things I couldn't do with my hands yet. So I didn't look at it. I walked past it.

The phone sat unanswered. The messages piled up. I told myself I'd get to them when I wasn't so tired, and the tired never ended.

The urge was loud. Not every day. But loud when it came. I'd sit on the floor of that apartment with the static filling the rooms, and I didn't have a place to put it. The drum kit was right there. I just couldn't pick up the sticks.

I wasn't failing. I need you to hear that before anything else. I wasn't failing. I was surviving with what I had, and what I had was the floor and the static and the phone that I was too tired to answer.

Thirty-Nine

At thirty-nine, I sit on the porch.

The static comes. It still comes. It's the same weather system, fourteen years later. Some days it's loud. Some days it's just a hum.

On the loud days, I've learned to say it out loud. I tell my wife, it's a static day. Two words. She doesn't ask what that means. She knows. She hands me the sweet tea and lets me sit with it.

I don't sit on the floor of the apartment anymore. I sit on the porch, and the static sits with me, and then I go out to the kit after dinner. The kits are kept in different rooms, but I'm the one walking to them now.

The same song. The bridge still trips me up, because the bridge has always tripped me up. But my hands know it now. I play it until the noise organizes, and the static settles into the rhythm.

The Song

The song is the through-line. Everything else changed. The apartment, the phone, the floor. But the song stayed.

At twenty-five, I couldn't play it. Not because I didn't know it. Because I couldn't trust my hands to hold the sticks without doing something I'd regret.

At thirty-nine, I play it on the bad days. The same bridge. The same minor turn in the middle.

It's not a triumph. It's not a victory. The static is still loud some evenings, and I still have evenings where I sit on the porch longer than I mean to, and the sweet tea goes warm.

But the song is the difference. It's not that I got better. It's that I have a place to put the noise now.

At twenty-five, I walked past the drum kit.

At thirty-nine, I play.

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