All Aboard The Solana: Let The Sun Shine
Photo by Thomas Bormans on Unsplash
Walking toward the train station, grappling with the strap of my satchel, I glimpsed into several scenes of young adults being wished well whilst wishing they were well off on their way. These were children of wealthy parents being shipped off to their wealthy universities back up north.
What must it feel like to have nothing but the worry of deciding which genre of success? To know it’s not a matter of how will I succeed, but in what way? Life in their eyes seemed as bright and careless as the sun shines, joyously swaying in an effortless Ceilidh with our world.
And today, I felt the singe of their grips.
As strange as their world was to me, so was this station. The walls, which raised their voices to the sky as I descended the switchback walkway, were caked with sand rock inclusions. I glanced at a cement, suspended bridge overhead as the quotidian sounds of traffic were muted. Gradually, the volume dropped. Allegrious life whooshed and swayed above like a pendulous algorithm. But I, and the others that reached the rock bottom, were in a whisper-less zone. Everyone stood and waited in silence. It was like a long rest before the inevitable boom of tympany drums and the boisterous clashes of cymbals signaling the climax of our anticipation.
I trailed down the long cool wall, then stopped. The crowd was on the other side of the tracks. I and one other found ourselves a seat among many empty benches. The shade gave us loners a chill. I looked, again, at the other side. They tanned under the sun’s radiance along with the desert rock that soared behind them.
As I sipped my mineral water, I glanced behind me and shared a gaze with the station’s clock. Suddenly! I heard what sounded like a violin trilling in the distance.
What is the tempo of time? I thought. Where is the master — the most accurate syncopated-with-the-universal-pulse clock?
The man beside me seemed nervous, not about my presence but over something I couldn’t infer.
What about composers? What are they other than stewards of space and time? They syncopate sensation with the pulse of time, rewriting how they choose rhythm to sound, coloring space as they see fit — with their emotions. If emotion could speak, it would be in music. And it does. To link the tenderness and sensitivity of our senses to the rigid, miserly, and forward-efficient force that is present — slipping away indefinitely into the cascading future. There, we send our humanity also, over the waters of uncertainty. Almost as if we were in a forever duel to remain in existence, to be relevant. Our feelings, our thoughts, our concerns, our opinions, our will, they all must come with us. Without them, our lives are as meaningless as rhetoric is to truth. We survive, but what fo — damn!
I’m on the wrong side of the tracks!
