If music builds worlds, it can also build things far greater: a quiet exchange of eye contact, those shared cigarettes between doorsteps, losing your wine, leaving yourself behind, finding someone else, then yourself again – under the rug that adulthood has yet to pull from behind your eyes. 

“When I said, ‘I can see me in your eyes’  

You said, ‘I can see me in your bed’” 

— The Strokes, I’ll Try Anything Once 

Music isn’t just something that observes romance or reflects it. There is no skeletal spectre with a quill, chained to the UE BOOM, watching you sleep with your flatmate. Music is romance. In a stranger’s living room, or behind the bar – a kiss is not soundtracked by the ambience of a song; the song sits within the kiss. If you let a song out into the night, it will decorate the interior worlds of whoever is half-asleep beside the gas hob at a party. It melds minds together, brings people from one room to the next, until you see the music being carried in someone else the way it’s been getting into you. Then the snare doesn’t cut you out and sell you away to go home with that person, for the music becomes the sharp breeze as you enter their rusted hallway, with you like a soft rope that someone is about to undo. 

So, what do you turn to when you’re lonely? 

When you put that song on to impress him, when they lived in the lyrics as you listened to an album half-asleep, when she played what she wrote for you on a cheap guitar – the music is not coming out of the person and drawing you towards them. The music becomes lodged in a kiss on the neck, the nervous smile you draw out as your hair touches theirs; not a catalyst, but a choir taped to their climax, one you know is going to take a lot of tears to rip off. 

But what’s wrong with letting the song stick? Love gets lost as much as it grows, but what remains is always the songs – the bands you can’t listen to anymore because they are still sitting in the music, waiting for you with arms that used to be yours. But don’t we still listen out for the time when the glue is gone? Are we not still there, on some night when that song plays and you can see them sitting beneath the piano, but you don’t mind it, because someone is turning up the speaker in the room next door. 

If music decorates time, it can never be in stasis. So, when love becomes music, it moves onwards. And then, eventually, you will too. 

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