Beat, step, beat, sway, step. The world, the whole fabric of reality becomes sound and loses any characteristic that is not intrinsic to sound. Is this listening? Is it something else? It is the way I listen to music, the way I need to become a surrogate medium through which sound waves propagate and turn into stories. Nothing else exist. I don’t exist; only the beat, only the sway, only the pure emotion exist. My life, paused, is reconstructed note by note.

I cannot write when I listen to music. I can only do something and listen to music when the something I am doing is not demanding, something like doing dishes or mopping the floor, something that can be done in automatic mode because music is all-encompassing. There is no intrinsic barrier between myself and music; I lose my everyday persona, become a different creature, hear and feel differently. I listen with my whole body; the experience transcends my conscious thoughts. My soul, wild and enchanted, listens too.

In an act both elevating and exhausting, my involvement with music when the connection gets established in my brain is all-consuming. It is like being a bird caught in the hands of a giant deity, something both warm and terrifying. How joyfully insane to be at the mercy of such an incomprehensible being! When the music stops, freed from its power, I would plummet to Earth, wings cut off, heart down in disarray, and wonder what just happened. Reality will gather me from among the scattered feathers to make me a mere mortal and clothe me in my banal existence again. —Poetic license; my existence, as you might well know, is everything but banal.— Exhausted I would be, but wanting to fly some more, to dance some more, to be deconstructed chord by chord once again. Let there be music!

So how about you, peeps? How do you listen, interact, or become something beyond yourselves with music? Do you sing along? Do you forget yourself? Or is it just a pleasant but unimportant distraction? Go ahead, wax poetically or remain unmoved, but do tell us.