The Music That Stayed

The music that shaped me.

I was born into a music-loving family. My dad was a music collector; a lot of vinyls and cassettes, and even spool tapes, were the norm. I guess most of the music would have come from Radio Bahrain and the tapes my sister made by recording off the radio.

But there were other tapes as well, which were also a staple diet for me, and when I search for them now, they are really very rare things indeed. I wonder who got them. Was it my dad, my brothers, or my sister? How did they come to know about these, like the James Last tapes, or Space, the French band? Was it just that everyone was listening to these gems at that time?

Even now, when I listen to some really good melody, my thoughts are, "My dad would like this." I wonder, do I have anything that’s of my own, or is it just what I learned from all the music around me?

I know most of the music was my brother’s choice, and whenever I listen to those songs, I think of him. Once he was visiting Pakistan, and I put on a tape that he used to love (The Carpenters), and he came alive and enjoyed it so much. These songs were like lullabies to me, but to see him enjoy them was a treat, and now listening to these songs often makes me sad as well. I sometimes wonder if these things really matter in the end. These old tapes, these forgotten melodies, these sounds that have followed us through life. They are just pieces of plastic and magnetic tape. Yet somehow they carry people with them. They carry rooms, voices, laughter, and moments that can never happen again.

Maybe that is what makes them matter. Maybe the answer is that we are all made from borrowed melodies. We don't create ourselves from nothing; we are a collection of the people and moments that touched us. The unique part is the way we carry them forward.

What I don’t understand is why I hold this music so dear while my other siblings don’t. It was their choice after all. Maybe it is because they left as life happened, and I was left behind, and all I had to feel near to them was this music.

Now when I play these songs and my children make faces, I hope that some of that wonder that I felt carries forward. How do I share the sheer joy this music gave me, when I spent hours playing on an invisible piano while I listened?

The realization that no one can actually share your experience of existence is incredibly lonely. We can love each other deeply, we can tell stories, we can share songs, but we can never completely step into another person's world. Maybe that is why we hold on so tightly to these fragments — the tapes, the photographs, the melodies. They are our attempts to leave behind a small doorway into the life we once lived.