White Girl Wasted Audio Recordings
Music and the Multiverse
Last night was the first decent night's sleep in a while. I only had two drinks before bed and made a point of brushing my teeth and using the listerine to remove the taste of cigarettes from my tongue. It wasn't a particularly restful sleep, more like a waking dose for 9 or so hours. My brain was actively awake by 6:45 but I refused to get out of bed until I had to. I let my body sink into the sheets and simply be. Pushing work and the day ahead from my mind. As always I drift in and out of dreams, conversations with old lovers, future plans, all in a haze of timelessness and anticipation.
We have a multiverse inside our bodies. We are a shell full of our histories, multiple copies of ourselves existing at the same time in the same skin but only one can be our present self. And that self is both gatekeeper and champion. It's not an easy job. I think for most people it's the gatekeeper who dominates, keeping our pasts close, romanticizing where we've come from because it's known, and quieting those voices of fear and doubt. Those voices can be exceptionally loud.
We all have our own ways of quieting the voices. From exercise, to books, to music. For me, these don’t help creating quiet. Music is especially useless. It's the key to so many memories and deep sensory emotions. Scientists have proven the link of music to memory formation with distinctions being noted in adolescence. That’s why we all seem to have so much nostalgia for music from our ‘coming of age’ years. In a suggestible state of mind, music can send us years into the past with all of the physical responses to particular moments in life: a lover's touch, the smile of someone now gone, the feeling of being outside, the smell of salt water and sunscreen.
For me, it was after a few drinks that the music became as dangerous as the alcohol. In an excitable frame of mind, my body would dance and my inner seductress would come out, Zeroing in on the closest safe choice, I'd make my move. When feeling the weight of loss, it is the opposite reaction – ghosting whomever I might have been with, stumbling home to sob to all of my favorite songs – reminding me of what I've lost, of who I was, of who I was aspiring to be, of the fact that once again I am shitfaced in my room alone– and continuing to drink until I simply fall over. Sometimes I'd vomit over the side of the bed and leave it until morning. The cat didn't care since she did it all the time too (minus the drinking of course).