I Am Music

By Cooper Snodgrass

Music– organized noise. Something so simple yet intangible. Something so powerful yet invisible. I am music; this is my song.

Freshman year, my father tried to kill my sister- then tried to kill himself shortly after. All I could do was watch as it happened. It wasn’t my age, experience, or lack thereof that kept me from acting- it was fear.

The fear of him.

The fear of the wrong choice.

The fear of a wrong note…

Now, two years later, I find music explaining my life to me: “Cause fear’s only a choice, one that we all must make someday” (The Arcadian Wild). Comfort, coming from people who don’t know me. People who can’t possibly know my song, yet they sing “Know you’re not alone in this.”

It’s funny, the things my brain remembers. I remember the lyrics to that 80’s song I don’t even like, but not what I had for breakfast. I remember the smell of the alcohol on his breath, but not the stale words he said. Maybe there’s a rhythm to this I have yet to understand; maybe I never will.

My indecision was a decision. I made my choice. Consumed by fear, my inability to act for myself spoke to who I was. It wasn’t apathy. Instead, something deeper. It was my intuition. Looking back, it’s easy to think of all the things that I could have done. The hard part is picking which is the best one. Maybe… maybe this is because there is no right answer. The decisions I’ve made, maybe they are so small, so insignificant that, in the end, they all lead to the same outcome. Maybe it’s above me.

So then it wasn’t fear; it was intuition. I knew that somehow, someway, everything would be okay. No matter the choices, no matter how many wrong notes I play, it’s my song. There are no wrong notes. I make the rhythms because I am the song. I am music.

So in the end, go out. Do your thing.

Make mistakes. Sound terrible.

Do it all again.

It doesn’t matter what the hell you do, but do it your way. Make it your song, even if no one remembers the lyrics. Don’t worry about what they think; they don’t know. Don’t worry about the past- you can’t do anything about it.

Don’t worry about the future- you can’t possibly know what will happen. In the end, know that you’ll play the right notes.

In the end, know that everything will be okay.