Have you ever listened to music? Not just plugged some earphones in on a busy bus or the radio in the car, I mean truly listen to music; immersing yourself into its everything… into its soul; letting each strum of the guitar, key play of the piano and note of a voice wash over and through you as if they were the waves of the sea. I know I hadn’t, not for the majority of my life. I had always associated music with the rat race, and the idolization of the size 0 “artists”, auto-tuned musicians and misogynist rappers whose vocabulary only seemed to contain vulgar and down-grading language. With this in mind it really was no shock that I wasn’t interested and certainly not invested in the musical, television and movie world. I worked, I slept and I met up with friends; it was no less a normal life, but it was not… real. It was meaningless really, days would pass within a blink of my eye but it was one song, and one man that turned that around so that it seemed like I could live my whole life… within the time of one song. That, is getting ahead of myself though; the beginning of my life was, as I said, a stale time in my life but it was the beginning nonetheless.

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Eating breakfast. Going to work. Come back home. Eat. Brush teeth. Sleep. Repeat. That, was, my life. Repetitive, average and I was fairly… happy, but there are differing levels and meanings behind happiness. There is the “safe” normal happiness that comes along with the way society approved lifestyle; study hard at high school, go to University and get a good job. Then, there is the route to happiness in which you search for yourself, for your inner wants, fears and desires that will hopefully lead you to discover what you need to do. Now, this is most likely a far cry from what people were expecting considering I started with a question about music but no. Everyone has different paths and enjoyments in life, and it just so happened to music would enlighten and change me all for the better. In fact, it was one song, one night and one man. I was down the pub enjoying a pint of beer on my weekend off after a hectic week at work and I was desperately trying to drone out the rest of the clientele in the room, to focus solely on my friends but the place was buzzing. I could slightly budge in any direction and I’d be intimately touching someone; not that I was particularly awkward in such situations but after having to deal with people all week it was not my idea of relaxing.

Irritation was growing inside me, with my stomach twisting into a tight knot and I began tapping my fingers against the glass whilst my mind slowly started to tune into the live music playing at the small stage. My fingers, which I originally had thought were tapping in frustration, had apparently subconsciously started tapping along in beat with the drums. This, in itself was a very uncommon thing for me to do so my instant reaction was to glance towards the stage with a confused expression. My eyebrows furrowed into my brow, and my eyes glinted with the soft lights from above as I stared at the man commanding the stage with a guitar almost glued to his body. Never had I seen someone so completed lost in their own world, in playing a tune so obviously important to them. His eyes were closed as the words seemed to leave his mouth naturally, flowing into the air; the sound waves washing over everyone in the room but you could see, as plain as day, that what he was doing was for himself and I found that beautiful. His long fingers plucked and strummed the strings on his guitar as if they were the most delicate, beautiful things in the world and what emitted certainly was. As I listened to the music, the lyrics that seemed to awake a whole new part of me, my legs moved on their own accord bringing me closer to this being.

“There’s a song surging upon like the waves
An unstoppable song is coming close
If not now, I feel like
My dreams will never come true
To meet myself as I am
Along the air, like the flying birds
I openly sing, sing
Like the whale that lives in the ocean
Across the waves
I dance openly, dance”

My eyes seemed to glaze over as I refused to blink, refused to miss even a single part of what was happening on this night that my very thoughts seemed to change and alter. Anyone looking upon this scene would find it ironic, the man who didn’t stop moving and swaying with the music with his eyes closed and the woman in front, with unblinking eyes and stature as still as rock but as soon as that thought had entered my mind, my breath caught in my throat as the man whose music had enraptured me, then opened his eyes to lock onto my eyes as well.