It’s the first day of fall. The new moon rose this morning but being the new moon, no one noticed.

Sitting with The Cure’s 1989 album Disintegration, it feels like the end. The end of an important decade for the band, but also the end of a relationship—all relationships—the end of living, and we both of us knew how the end always is.

If music is a portal to the past there’s a time those pathways open in your brain. And for me I can pinpoint the period that happened with Disintegration, one weekend in the fall.

A newly minted fraternity brother, my sophomore year in college, driving to the woods in the corner of Pennsylvania by the New York border not far from Niagara Falls. A weekend retreat in a cabin where all we did was drink beer, burn wood, eat grilled food and sleep. But I can remember the drive and listening to that new Cure record in the car.

So self-consumed in youth I imagined the words and music were made just for me (even more self-consumed to think I was the only one who experienced that feeling).

I heard the music and lyrics for the first time and as a budding young poet tried to incorporate those lyrics into my poems. Our professor said I can pick your voice out of a crowd, and that was a good place to start, but there was so much further to go.

Sometimes the rain sounds like static in the forest, the way it hits the leaves. The reflection in the puddle trope, or worse, the selfie of my shadow’s silhouette superimposed at a dramatic angle on some landscape. Pine needles on the trail like so much spilled brown rice. Hell is being made to reread old poetry you once distributed proudly for your peers.

Th Cure album was part of a trilogy concept but I didn’t care. For me it was a personal soundtrack to an important time in my youth, as music is to most.

Like Dawn’s dad and his love of Dave Brubeck’s Time Out album, or Chet Baker, west coast jazz. Hard to know what that music really signified for him but I’d love to read about it. Only snips through faded photos of him wearing sunglasses and sweaters, probably smoking, holding what must be a Bloody Mary. A time when American cars were covered in chrome, bucket seats, no seat belts; you just got in and out. What kind of American dream were they embracing then and hearing in that music, what lifestyle? Compared to ours, when we need to hold on to what’s real for fear we’ll lose it.

I would often play the Brubeck album Time Out when Dawn’s parents visited for Sunday dinner, and sit with her dad Dick enjoying a drink, watching him tap his knee and bob his head to the beat.

The record plays on a different time signature for reasons I’ll never understand but I’m sure Dick did. He would have studied the players’ names but forgotten a good bit of it; listening to the record helped take him back.

Music as a portal to the past. The past may be gone but you could re-summon it in an instant; it spooled out the same as it always did, preserved in an analogue jar.

Still the idea of going back was a ruse and we knew it. “Buying time,” “keeping time”: how could you hold on to something that doesn’t exist? What were we without our memories?

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, The Cure