What a joy it can be, to wrench open your mind and find yourself inhabiting a song. To live out a thousand lives, to know the intimacy of a stranger, and experience nostalgia in such a visceral way for times and places you’ve never been to.

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It’s hard to consider happiness in practical terms when freedom is a mere memory, and the closest you’ve come to romance in years is simply holding someone’s hand for an hour. When your physical reality and circumstances are so violently oppressive to the soul, one must find alternative avenues of enjoyment and expression. To detach from the mundane parade of your waking hours and securely climb into the embrace of a musical artist, interloping with sonic expressions of abstract identity and emotion; riding your way through melodies and bass lines, as we have as humans for so many thousands of years, and take solace in lyrics conveying truths about ourselves long hidden or obscured.

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Music soothes and saves. It is both journey and destination, rolled up into a strange realm of infinite space and possibilities. It offers a chance for reflection, to analyse and explore ourselves and the world at large. Foreign perspectives and takes so far away from our own provide much needed contrast, while common feelings unify us in kind.

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Untethered dives into the depths of passion, subtle stitches to mend a lifetime of loss and forlorn mistakes. Peer to peer connections through glimpses of captured beauty. Submerged so long that you can forget the pain, however temporary. Other excursions offer catharsis, a session of metaphorical bloodletting where pain can be extracted and processed properly, released and left to the wayside. An antidote to apathy and other blockages caused by unconscious processes of self-protection, a breaking down of walls and barriers constructed historically to remain functional and stoic.

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Most of my life was spent living near the coast, watching swarms of people flock towards the golden sands each summer like birds in an unshakable pattern of daily migration. Bronzed bodies, seagulls, towels, fish & chips. The sizzling heat washing over the masses, packing the foreshore like tinned sardines. Not my cup of tea.

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My visits to the beach were usually solo pursuits, well past sunset, to be alone with the sounds of the waves crashing up into the shore. To gaze blankly into the distant horizon, with the cool textured sand under my skin, and the chill of the calm sea breeze through my hair.

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There is no longer anywhere to go. No midnight drives through the forest, no casual people-watching on a slow train ride home after a gig. No more first dates, no more popping in to visit an old friend, while you’re passing through their area. Just these seemingly endless walls.

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Music is my happy place now, my passport to living in a song again, an escape however brief; I shall cherish it always.