I finally took some time to start reconnecting with the threads of my past, today.  I had been putting it off for so long, much longer than usual.  "I'm afraid of what I might find...or not find," I told my therapist about it.

I found the usual things though.  Happiness, sadness, nostalgia, memories stirred that had been forgotten.  But perhaps most of all a familiar feeling.  In the day to day of trying to make sure that I'm doing all of the right things, I forgot that once upon a time I was all by myself, feeling either alone or anxious.  "Like something was wrong".

I made this song in 2023, "Only You", after having quite the challenge of a year to go through.  I knew the song was flawed, and "raw", for lack of a better way of putting it, but it felt authentic, too.  I knew that despite my misgivings with it that it was the way it was meant to be.  I think the me of that time understood that what I felt was "off" about that song reflected the same way that I felt toward the year.  It didn't go how I planned, it certainly didn't measure up to the original composition of the melody ("One and Only", by aivi tran).

It's rare for me to take someone else's work and ascribe new emotional meaning to it.  I mean, yes, I did a whole rearrangement album a long time ago, but even then, I don't think it was really the same.  Not the same as this song, anyways.  I've tried to write music from emotion before, but it's actually not something that comes naturally to me, not at all.  There are a few songs (my Mario theme remix, and "Let's Have an Adventure"), that came out of a feeling of uplifting cheerful exuberance, for sure, but there's very few other than that.  "Only You" is perhaps really the one example I can really point to.

I said that my arrangement doesn't "measure up" to the original composition and I think that's certainly true, but going back to it now it so clearly reminds me of a certain bundle of feelings, a certain state of mind.

I recall that song again now, having connected with these strands from my past -- a past that I can no longer go back to.  A past that I am hesitant to explore, yet relieved when I find that it carries both the same meaning, and even the same lack of meaning, as always.

There is another melody that I've written that I come back to during times like this, "Toki's Theme".  Another one of these tracks I've made once upon a time that hardly anybody remembers I'm sure, but not so for me (I use it as an alarm tone as well...).

I clasp together the healing amulet that was given to me once upon a time and as I feel lost, looking in the distance at the waves and the empty shore, I remember that even in solitude there is peace if you can search for it.  That even if your past has gone, its whispers and echoes can still lend you a gentle comfort.  At times the past can guide us, be our north star, be our reason d'etre.  But it doesn't really have to do any of those things either.  It can simply be a fixed presence in our lives.  Something that is there.  It doesn't need to catch our fall in order to be supportive.

Toki lives in her own time.  This I know, because...well, of course I know, I designed her, silly.  She is...of course, similar to me, but reading the way she writes, she feels a little bit different, too.  It's hard to describe in words.  I feel like Toki is perhaps, a more guarded version of me.  Me on my proper writing behavior, perhaps.

I guess most of all, Toki seems more...hopeful about things.  Is that...how I used to be?  Before the feelings of "Only You", before I saw the blue koi vanish before my eyes, before I said goodbye to some of my best friends?  Did I really believe that some things, will always come back to me no matter what?  Hmm...I guess, when I stop and think about it, yes.  I know distinctly that there were times in my life that made me feel that hope.  That made me think, "oh...maybe it really can be true.  Maybe there exist things in this world that will truly return to me."

Toki seems also to live life at a bit slower of a pace than mine.  I guess, in that way, she reminds me of how I was in college, at some point.  It was a peaceful yet lonely existence; it makes me wonder a bit whether those two traits of my life were intertwined.

"A world changed by time, scarred by the past of you."

Some things change, others stay the same.  I'm still listening to my own music as a blog, late at night, thinking about these things.  But something is, indeed, different this time.  A little meowmie, beckoning me to bed.  Reminding me that even in the midst of being lost, there is still something to be found.