Pick your poison: the volume knob.

I don’t realize how loud it’s gotten until my eardrums cannot handle the banging anymore. I try to stop thinking about the what-ifs: what if my parents are right behind me, my speakers blow out, or I get into a wreck. My what-if worries come back, as always, jumbled and incoherent, stretched out or compressed, and fighting for attention with my music. The two fiercely battle in the cabin of my car, and after a while, I stop hearing about the what-ifs.

My thoughts run around like people. Worries run like athletes, and joys smile with expressions too happy to be counterfeit. Fears hold their elder’s fingers until their fingernails turn purple, and lonelys sit in isolation screaming. Upsets scurry around crowded rooms tapping shoulders to ask for hugs. Sillys sprawl their limbs out to lay down laughing, and idle thoughts are idle.

Sound settles in the atmosphere like weather. Heat lightning comes in illuminating white flashes and high notes, and soft thunder comes with rippling depth of importance. Periwinkle-blue clouds float to and fro harmonically, and burning snowflakes come as raspy voices, raspy instruments, and raspy insights. Meager raindrops make light melodies. Sharpened horns of tornadoes turn rhythm into intuition, impulse, and id.
Even though I see the road through the foggy, tainted tones of shouting songs, I see just fine. Even though I unravel my thoughts onto my dashboard as I drive, I find it is no distraction to watch their allegoric play on my way home. For me, when my volume rises, reality gets caught somewhere between my thought’s scrambled sentences and the bass drops that shake my car and I to the core. I don’t lose myself to the music; music allows reality to lose itself to me, or maybe something in between.

It’s therapeutic to drive inside this illusory, turbulent scene, but maybe my music makes my driving skill less than ideal. After all, it’s hard to drive when the steering wheel becomes a mic stand, and an air guitar appears somewhere near my navel. It’s hard to drive when a left hand turn becomes another chance to hit the whip, and traffic is practically a cue for a guitar solo. But my music, and its consistent ability to alter reality, is important to me.

So, I crank it to see the mist from the tempest music again. Crank it to soothe the grip marks reality leaves on me. Crank it to get lost in the labyrinth of the rhythm again. The two yellow lines are my golden threads that guide me home. It’s the trance found in dance, the belong in song, and the serenity in stereo. I know it will make me feel better, so I turn up my radio.

In between the wheel and my seat I have created a space to fill with thoughts from my entire subconscious, my conscious, anything. It’s a space bound by leaden windows and fuzzy, tan framework, and plastic veneers over wooden steering wheels. It’s a place protected by cushion seats and armrests with black stitches and rearview mirrors to see the yellow dots blurring into one line. I made my space mine with time and shining music.

With a familiar flick of my key or the volume knob, reality returns. The thoughts come back into me, the sounds simply settle around me, and the scenery I drive through is stable once more. Though, it’s never the same as I left it.

Sometimes that’s a good thing.  

It’s loud and overwhelming, but I love the calm that comes from my music. My speakers are my emotional vents. My volume knob and radio channels are my box of chocolates. The beat doesn’t come from me beating myself up. The emotion in the lyrics is not my own. The solos remind me not to be lonely when I drive home. Even the most emotional harmonies cannot harm me because at some level, at some volume loud enough to deter everyone else, the music does the feeling for me. And that’s something I cannot let go.

I speed through the scenery, and my steering wheel allows me to sift through the views of the outside world without any real attachment. My thoughts spill out like passengers exiting a train, but I feel the crowd spilling without any real attachment. The images that roll by my windows blur together, and soon my thoughts and emotions stop fighting and blur together too: smears of streetlights and tree-limbs, heartbreak and harmonies, tomorrow’s, yesterday’s, right-now’s. They come to vanish like snowflakes on skin. Some come from within. But most come from the music that clouds and clears my mind; the smoke that I choose to drive in.

My musical moments make me more mature. I release my crazy so that it doesn’t rattle my ribcage when I most need it to be silent. I can see it in other people shaking, and I can see their need to let it out. I don’t know how to tell them that screaming out songs is the liberation that they crave, so I sit back and think about it instead. Maybe it isn’t right for them; maybe it’s all in my head. I wait for them to create something that helps them alleviate that jumping tick. I wait, and I don’t know if I will ever stop waiting for it. One day, I could stop waiting if everyone would be ok. Or, I could finally break the waiting that holds me like clay. I could let go of the waiting that keeps me alone. I could step out of my car, open up my muffled doors, and ask everyone if they would like to ride home.