The song plays in the background, a soulful melody evoking feelings I had thought were laid dormant for good. It creates a stirring in my stomach, in my soul, making me long for something I don’t have, something I’m not sure I ever really did have. Something I desperately want.

Dwelling on the words, on the concepts, makes me melancholy. The sky outside is a light gray, a foreshadowing of the storm slated to arrive in the next few hours. I sit, entranced, listening to the song over and over again. I tend to do this, to find a song whose words speak to the very core of my being and play it again and again until I become immersed in it. It’s where I turn when I’m confused, where I turn when I just don’t know what exactly it is that I’m supposed to be doing or thinking or feeling.

Love. The songs are all about it, the aching and the longing and the wanting and the wishing. And they sell. And they’re played. And they’re written about and spoken about, these once-private feelings of the songwriter made public by some desire to share his soul with another, with many others. They’re commercialized, yes, but at some point, when pen went to paper, they were immediate and real and authentic. And that’s why I dwell on them. The core of the words, of the song, speaks to me, speaks to that authentic part of myself that I don’t often let people see, the part of me that I never question.

Or maybe it’s a lost cause.