My most vulnerable memories usually involve public musical experiences, like that one. I'm settled quite snugly behind my intellectual armaments when from beneath my feet a geyser erupts and propels me fifty feet up, over the wall, and out to sea. Suddenly my sister is eyeing me in confusion from the church pew as the deacons march down the aisles during a moving offertory solo. My piano teacher is patting my quivering shoulder in bewilderment, having just demonstrated how you're supposed to play that intermediate Arabasque. The Barnes & Noble clerk politely averts his eyes as I hang up the headphones and blinkingly step around the shelf towards the exit.
Usually I manage to be just tense enough or studiously flippant enough to avoid triggering that geyser. I keep my vision idly trained on the stained glass windows in church, or on the distractingly cute child three pews up. I fiddle with my earrings or trace my collarbone in chapel, keeping my eyes moving across the numerous polite faces surrounding me. I avoid audio departments on principle. I keep my heart sealed in the vacuum-wrap of intellectual distance.
And that makes me wonder about all those other faces around me, so relaxed and vacant, so gently focused. Are they feeling as vulnerable as I am beneath their quiet restraint? Do evoked memories and hopes and fears heap like casualties of war against those careful battlements, to be buried once the song recedes?
Do they yearn, as I do, for the frankness of isolation? Or do they long, even more secretly, for kinship in their emotion--a sympathetic hand to squeeze in fellowship of feeling?
Are we all gingerly seated atop the same geyser, without realizing it?
(What would happen, do you think, if we all surrendered at once? Where would it take us?)
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