The Noise of Life

A lifetime ago I use to play the saxophone. Tenor saxophone to be exact. It was while I was in high school for about three and a half years. Concert band was kind of a big thing and I would be lying if I said I didn't have a bit of a crush on my saxophone teacher. He was a bit cool. I loved playing saxophone, I don't particularly think I was very good at it, but I tried my best. And there was a camaraderie that develops with the band folk. Looking back it was a special time during those teenage years. I gave up playing the saxophone when I started year 11. The thought of trying to do music for my HSC in the form of playing my saxophone, was altogether too daunting for me. I had to reluctantly hand my very loved tenor saxophone back to the music department.  Unfortunately it wasn't mine to keep.  I think at the time the band fees were going up too and it was a cost that was a bit too much. For years, and I mean probably a good 10 years, I would dream about that saxophone. It was like my brain was subconsciously grieving the loss of this instrument I use to play. In a way I was grieving it too, a symbol of the musical creativity that was such a significant part of my life. Always in those dreams, I would never actually get to play the saxophone, I remember though, I so desperately wanted to. But something would always happen or go amiss or I would wake up right before I had a chance to play a tune. I vowed one day that I would buy my own tenor saxophone and get back into playing, maybe find a tutor and start doing this thing I loved so much. Then life happened and it got set aside for all that life stuff. Kids, partner, relentless hamster wheel life. I can barely read music anymore. I think it was probably one of the first things my brain pruned when I stopped playing and when the family came along. My brain was filled with baby and children stuff instead. Last week I had a dream about my beloved saxophone. For the first time in probably over a decade. It was nice to see it again, even if only in a dream. And as usual I never did get to play it, despite feeling that longing to. I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something. Remember who you were. Remember who you still are. All that creativity is still there, it just got lost amongst the noise of life. Maybe one day I will get another saxophone and find a tutor and play again, if only for myself. Maybe one day I will pick up my guitar and remember how to play the songs I used to. Maybe one day I will find my voice and sing the tunes I use to sing and write. I think my singing voice has probably packed up and left though, I never was a great singer, but I liked how it made me feel to sing. The one constant throughout the years has been my writing. I have a 20 year old journal, much of the first third of it is full of cringy teenage angst and longing, unrequited love. The rest is full of cringy adult angst and unrequited love, but in a more refined form. Mostly poetry. I often just wanted someone to share all those absurd little poems with, someone who would see me through my tapestry of words and we could find a kinship with our creativity and somehow take on the world. It is an impossible, fantastical, romantic notion. It constructs this expectation on another individual to be able to make space for you and hold the weight of your creativity while also holding their own, while also translating and interpreting that into some sort of meaningful human connection. Maybe I am talking out of my arse, I have no problem sharing my thought bubbles anymore. The simple version is, finding your person and sharing things that you love and things that make you, you and makes them, them. Even though my partner and I have been together for over 20 years, it's something that has been a bit misaligned, the creative stuff. He has always been musically inclined and plays guitar better than me, but the writing stuff, my waxing lyrical nonsense, is just not something we have found common ground with. And I am not sure why. Perhaps it is because I feel too vulnerable to share, which doesn't make sense when you have been with the same person for two decades and made lots of children with them. I think perhaps some of it is because I want something just for myself. And some of it would be because he is not particularly interested. He doesn't read my blog. Citing that he lives with me, why does he need to read it. I suppose he has a point. But he misses out on a part of my inner dialogue that he doesn't necessarily get on a day to day basis of hamster wheeling. Anyway, I have gone on a tangential thought path and ended up at an awkward dissection of my relationship. He is a good egg. He is my person. And I am wise enough to know he can't hold all my existential, creative nonsense. He has a big enough job, holding my madness. I love him for it, amongst many other things.
So dreaming about my saxophone again is nice, albeit a tad nostalgic. Maybe I won't dream of it again, who knows. But I hope I do. I missed my old friend.