At 10 a.m., Belinda Carlisle blares from the speakers of the SUB, her refrain assuring me that heaven is, truly, a place on earth. But is it? Morsels of oatmeal burrow into my teeth and throat, and I knew that if someone I know were to come up to me at this moment I’d be unable to audibly greet them before clearing every piece out of my mouth. As I prepare for a nonexistent interaction, I’m unsure if I can make sounds at all. Speaking is all I do nowadays. But in the past, I did much more.
As a child and eventually a teenager, I poured hours of my day into continuous music-making, or music-listening — whether I wanted to or not. Avoiding sonic activity was not easy in my household, where I would often be sandwiched between my mother’s operatic scales and my father’s creation of perpetual drone. My sister and I would switch between various chosen instruments, with her pursuing flute and piano and me dabbling with violin and guitar — while both singing in a choir that seemed to exist forever. My parents, both skilled musicians, studied the craft in their teenage hood and well into college. Together, they strove to ensure that their daughters’ educations intertwined with a love for music, closely mimicking their own.
It was the norm to be surrounded by sound from the moment we awoke, into the late hours of night. Once or twice a month, my father would rouse my sister and me from the warm corners of our rooms to join him in the kitchen to dance together on the squeaky faux wood floors. Songs were chosen with only one rule — they had to be known by every member of my family.
Although the songs themselves would change — Bee Gees’ “How Deep Is Your Love,” Sheryl Crow’s “There Goes The Neighborhood,” The War On Drugs’ “Under The Pressure” — the giggles and melodies between each lyric remained the same, accumulating throughout the years to curate a thick tapestry of memories.
Not every musical experience was as happy as those, often involving my father plugging his phone into the kitchen speaker set at 7 a.m. to project a wave of ambient noise into my room, which was nearest to the kitchen. These kinds of sounds require a certain mood to be listened to, and early hours of the morning don’t happen to produce that kind of mood. Despite this, I find myself longing for those moments as I walk to class listening to my father’s beloved sounds. It becomes increasingly difficult to reclaim the music that infiltrated every layer of my life pre-adulthood.
During my formative years, I rebelled outrageously against my parents’ hopes of me being a musician, often reminding them that I would never follow in their steps. This idea cast an expectation in my direction and I shunned it. I was constantly peeved at the assumption that I would naturally follow the same route that my mother and father traversed before me — just because we were related. It made no sense to replicate someone else’s life, especially when there was already so much musical activity in my daily routine.
I was enrolled in various music classes while being consistently in and out of musical theater, choir and dance. While these practices were enjoyable, I would rage inside because I felt like my parents’ lives were being soldered to mine — with little regard to what my personal dreams were. Though I didn’t know what I wanted, I was unhappy doing what my parents wanted.
This led to a constant conflict with choir practice and discipline concerning the instruments I was learning. I could not understand the rigorous methods of practice that were expected of people like my parents. Music didn’t bring me as much joy as it did when my father and I danced in the kitchen to songs we loved.
As my 18th birthday grew close, I began to wonder whether I truly enjoyed being a musician — whether I appreciated its presence in my life. Plagued by these thoughts, I determined the anguish in my life to be caused by a persistent musical background. I built a year of distance between myself and any instrument or vocal practice. Not caring whether this abrupt change disappointed or disturbed my parents, I resolved to start anew in my freshman year of college. It did work. The only musical experiences I partook in existed in the wires between my ears and a phone, or watching performers on a stage I did not share.
Despite the lengths I took to put a gap between my current life and my childhood, I began to miss singing. My voice was the first thing I noticed, as I used to sing constantly. As time went on my voice lost agility—made more obvious in comparison to my mother or sister, or even to the songs of others. Every time I moved back with my family for the summer, the difference between my musical activity and my family’s grew stronger. I ignored it, thinking that I could return to music whenever I wanted to — if I really wanted to. But as my father regularly repeated, “practice makes perfect,” and I abandoned practice willingly.
The realization of having lost an integral part of myself to petty teenage moods was crippling, and I realized it too late. I had trouble discerning what I wanted, and what my teenage self thought they wanted, resulting in a terrible disposal of possible talent and joy. While I attempted to salvage a musical routine in my recent years at school — dabbling in piano and choir — I admit it is harder to find an ease in the act of singing and playing instruments I once played diligently in the past. I often feel that the rhythm within a song hides from me, that it knows I hated it once. Daily conversation lacks the enjoyment I seek simply because it is lacking in melody. Though it is painful to say, I occasionally feel ashamed at singing now, because it will never compare to the voice I possessed when I was a child.
Sometimes, on the way to class, I linger in the open doorway of a choir practice down the hall, catching a glimpse of music I once was completely immersed in. Choral music is a mesmerizing yet saddening sonic environment, reminding me of everyone in my family and anything else beautiful in the world. If heaven was a place on earth, it would definitely be in that specific place.