Play it Out

You can't dictate to, or replicate a day, instead you let it play out. You can pick the key, settle on a tempo, but the melody comes, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere. Or maybe you have the chord pattern, a stray riff, and your partner comes up with a sequence of words, and at first blush the chords and words don't really seem to fit, but then you play it out, and chords and words start to cohere, a melody emerges, and after awhile you can't imagine those particular words standing up without those particular chords behind them. So you take these disparate elements and put them together and the two of you sit in the kitchen and you repeat the chords and words over and over, until you realize that you actually have a song. You both smile as your voices snake in and out, and around each other, sometimes in harmony and sometimes not quite. A little slice of happiness kind of descends over the scene, you've created something new, together, something that didn't exist before and there's joy and wonder in that knowledge. It's a little thing, just a little song, a ditty, kind of funny and sad at the same time, and it all came out unbidden; no struggle. You can't dictate or replicate a day, a song, it's a gift that you receive, and when all is said and done you realize that's sometimes how it all works.