Music is something else entirely.
It could be a random Saturday night. I am folding laundry, minding my business, and then a song comes on. Just like that I am gone. Not physically, but mentally I am somewhere else completely, pulled back into a moment that happened years ago like it was yesterday.
The feelings come back first. Then the memories follow. The excitement of that time, the happiness, the sadness, the things I am not proud of, all of it rushes in at once like a flood that a single song somehow unlocked. I am standing in my laundry room folding a shirt and for a moment I am completely lost in another version of my life.
No photo album does that. No video. Nothing triggers memory and emotion the way music does, except maybe a smell or at times the weather. It bypasses everything rational and goes straight to the feeling.
That is what makes it fascinating to me. A three minute song can collapse twenty years in an instant and put you right back in a place you thought you had left behind. Sometimes that is beautiful. Sometimes it stings. Most of the time it is both at once.
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