For as long as I can remember, I have loved music and ever since I was about ten years old, I have considered myself a drummer, moreover, a percussionist. My best friend, who is absolutely amazing on the guitar, and I have been playing music together since we were about fifteen. We have known each other since we were five. Whenever we play together, which is at least once a week, something just clicks.
We have no prior idea of what we’re about to play when we get together. Some might call it a jam session. I just give him two measures of a beat and he picks up his guitar and just starts playing. And the absolute best part of it is that we know each other so well and we know each other’s musical abilities and styles so well that I can feel when his music is about to change and I play accordingly. To an outsider, it would sound like these songs were rehearsed, but we often have never heard them ourselves before the very moment that we play them into existence. It is quite possibly one of the greatest feelings I can experience, to do something I love with someone who is very close to me and very important to me, playing in such wonderful synch that we can just feel when the other person is going play a different riff or fill or whatever. I would not trade this for the world.
I wish that everyone could have someone with which they are so close they just know what the other person is going to do. Not necessarily musically, but in whatever area that bonds two people together the most. I am very fortunate that my best friend and I love music so much and have such a strong musical friendship as well as emotional friendship. It makes our music better and the music makes us better friends. There is something that goes beyond a level of comfort with each other, it goes beyond two friends or two musicians. It is music. It is what we love. Anyone who hears us can tell.
There is me, the drummer, and there is him, the guitarist. And there is my rhythm and his melody, but more importantly, there is our music.
The song by the same title is one that always gets me thinking. There are a lot of different people who live in that song, but you’re the melody. I am writing this for you.
I know that we have not always seen eye to eye and there have been days, many, in which we never wanted to see each other. I know that you don’t understand what this means to me, how much I credit you with everything you see here, see in me. What does not kill us makes us stronger, right? Right. I found the strength to accept, sympathize, even when I had to crawl with broken bones and on bloodied knees because I know that there is no greater gift that any one person can give to another than forgiveness. I hold you accountable for what you did, but I no longer hold it against you. I know that you never planned any of this, that you don’t know how to accept and deal properly with what you’re feeling. I know, believe me, I know how much things can hurt, how much pain you carry with you. I carried it too. But there is no room, lovely, for holding onto the past, for regret, for keeping it in and letting it chip away at you. How can you ever experience what I feel if you do? How can you ever know what I know, be able to smile with tears in your eyes? My greatest wish for you is that one day, you can forgive your perpetrators, your thorns in your side, and reach this place that I would have never found without you.
What there once could have been will never be now, but that is not to say that there can’t be anything. I have experience in rebuilding, as I have done it so many times I am a master. Now it is your turn. I do not hate you, I do not dislike you, I do not fault you. I understand, maybe moreso than anyone, because we are so similar and I know I never wanted us to be. But there is nothing I can do now. I love you for who you are despite what you carry inside you. It is unlikely that I will ever fault you for what happened to me as a result. More important than being sorry is taking the steps to heal, yourself before anyone else. I can help you, I have some experience. The tragic undertone of my previous statement is heartbreaking, but I don’t want you to feel it. I have buried the past in writing and sound and that is where it will stay. Let’s try this again. And again. And again. Until we get it right.
This is alive in me because you forced me to cultivate it, forced me to turn to it, to find in it what I wanted to find in you. This creation, my creation, is all of ours, because I never would have done it without every single person involved having done what they did or said what they said.
Years from now, when I am gone but never really gone, this will come to fruition and I will be able to look you in the eye and thank you sincerely. I am not there yet, but let’s get there together.
And now it’s time to leave the lights and hope the future is just as bright. Please think of me back home. We’re so, so close. And even though I’m so far gone, know that I wrote out one last song, a piece of me to hold. I’m so, so close. We are so, so close.
Love, absolutely always,
MJ
