Music Takes Nothing
By: Jeremiah Hayden
Tags: Music, Grief, Covid 19, Mental Health, Creative Non Fiction

photo by Robertsen Ashman

You open the door and enter into a silent, dark hallway, turn around, pull the door closed and make your way to the light switch on the other side of the double doors. It feels like a holiday in here, you think to yourself as you flip the light on and make eye contact with the security cameras. You pass door after door, empty room after empty room, and make your way around the corner, keys jingling. The door unlocks, you enter the room, close the door behind, and drop your bag on the ground. It’s cold in here. You can feel it as you take your jacket and mask off and let the cold air hit the last few-hundred dewy breaths that have collected around your nose. You throw your jacket over a microphone stand, try not to knock anything over as you stagger behind a drum kit and sit. There used to be energy here.

There used to be people here. Even in the daytime, or an actual holiday, you would have run into someone, or the timed light in the hallway would have still been on from whoever was here before you showed up. Walking through the hallways, you would have heard some surprisingly great music being played in the adjoining rooms — noisy, avant jams that you would have found out were, surprise, actually two or three groups playing, each in their own rooms simultaneously; notes blending in the hallway to make something much weirder and more interesting than the sum of its parts. Free jazz, maybe.

You throw your headphones on, knock at something.

Turn it up.

Conjure something.

Something was easy to conjure. It’s easy to conjure something that is waiting nearby, but these days, it is nowhere to be found.

Music is a magnet. It offers a unique pull that connects people to itself and to each other. It connects people to a spiritual realm, even if they don’t believe in anything spiritual. It connects listeners to each other and each to their self in ways that make no sense and don’t have to. The immediacy of creating music heals the people who create it, remarkably so when they create it together. Music immediately heals those who listen to it, if momentarily.

These moments are fleeting, but they randomly magnetize the culture and energize us long enough to get to the next thing. Magnetic as we are, we then magnetize our surroundings.

Music takes nothing; it only gives.

Conjure something. It’s still there, it’s just on pause; it’s masked up, for now.

You take a breath and break the silence. That old neighbor from the empty room next door must wish they could go back to the days of being annoyed by my noise. The things we’ve lost.

The room sits mostly empty, but something wells up as the line outside starts to move indoors. You notice the anticipation, however subtle. Your friend walks straight from the line outside to the one at the bar, orders a drink, keeps it open.

Seeing people by accident is a privilege we never knew we had. Seeing their smile is another one. We used to put our cheeks together and wrap our arms around a friend, even if we had seen them just a day before. Imagine that. Try someone’s drink; shake hands — all good options then.

Are they starting now? The conversation is cut short, but we’ll catch up later. The room fills with sound. People cram in like sardines in a crushed tin box and nod as if to say yes to whatever magnetic field is expanding out from the stage at the front of the room, pulling them into its intrinsic power. The force is as contagious as it is generous.

Conjure something.

You get lost in the music. It cleanses your soul enough to find some calm and spread a little to your people.

You open your eyes and see no one in front of you; take your headphones off and hear nothing.

The timed light in the hallway has clicked off and no one has come to turn it on again. As you shut the door behind yourself and enter into the darkness — donning a mask and a bottle of hand sanitizer that smelled good, at first — you allow a moment of grief to pass through you. The things we’ve lost are immeasurable. Some are great and permanent; some small and temporary; all of them heavy.

We’ve lost our magnetism, but we’re floating around ok for now. And we’ll know where to go when we need to re-up.

We’ll catch up, later.