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i think he was a cowboy
then i hoped he was a cowboy.
[chief cheep]
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When I was twenty-two my sister told me about the music she heard when she was going to sleep, music that was strange and sweet and altogether new. I'd asked her what she had dreamed about the night before and this was her answer, the notes that visited her and rose and fell as she drifted off. She mentioned it matter-of-factly, while I was standing glassy-eyed and gape-mouthed at the mirror curling my eyelashes.
I watched her reflection as she moved away from the dresser and slung a jacket over her narrow shoulders, and then she left for work and I couldn't stop thinking about it then and I can't stop thinking about it now, years later. When she closes her eyes and begins to fall away at night, she hears this music beginning, composed in her head, new to everyone but her. She said, What? Don't you?
The short answer is no. I don't. I love music and I need it and I have no idea how to create it myself, and for the first time this terrified me in a very specific way. I would have no way of knowing music unless other people, these people like my sister, drew it up out of their imaginations. This strange symphony has visited her in the dark as long as she can remember while I slept beside her, uninvited and oblivious. Is this magic common to other musicians, composers? I felt like I should slip my shoes off, kneel at the polished hardwood by her bed. This is where the music comes from.
If I was alone on an island, my dreams would swirl with color and different degrees of brightness, my mind would race with broken stories, words strung into half-formed sentences, but it would all be done to a background of crashing waves. Nothing else.
Today especially, on a cool, overcast, pulse-quickening morning, this haunts and elates me in turns. What else do these people walking by me know? What do they see, hear, taste? Things I can't imagine, much less create. I mourn everything that doesn't make it from someone's mind to paper, instrument, paint or plate, and this makes our purposes seem so much clearer, so much more urgent.
On almost-winter days like this one, when I can't quite remember what visits me in my dreams, I think about my sister's songs and have to acknowledge that low murmur I roll right over most of the time- What do I still withhold from the world?
