I've Got All This Ringing In My Ears And None On My Fingers

I Wouldn't Want to be You

Does music ever make you feel in love?

Deep yearning from the inside of your chest flickering to an all consuming bonfire of love. You think ideas, relationships, emotions you have had yet to fulfill. Your head bobs to the music, your body sways or perhaps, your finger tips simply tap on your knee. Its tunes travel from the top of your head to the sensual curl of your toes. Eyes squeezed together and ears hot, blood rushing, with the various screams of every genre. The warning signs from 'Caution: Volume too loud! May cause hearing damage.' on your phone, but you don't care.

Does music make you feel seen?

Lyrics that define who you are, rhythms that hook your heart onto the parallelism between your life and someone else's; you are not alone. Allowing the music to play as loud as it can be; the tremors, the vocals, the area, the space, the club. You need to feel the music vibrating through every single corner of the room- need to feel the tune in every crevice of your body. The harsh truths about yourself, the funky steps that make you stumble as if you were a newborn deer. New tastes that condense sweat on your forehead and make your lips dry, thirsty to bust another move along the musical wavelengths.

Music makes you fucking intense.

It shakes you, breaks you. Brings tears in your eyes when the fanfare of a trumpet wanes lonesome in the silence of white noise. It synchronizes your heartbeat to the bass booming in your ears- taking away your anxieties of the recession and living in the party of now. Music raises children, teaches teenagers slang and obscenities, it is used as a timeline. Measured in maturity and immaturity, it brings culture to an otherwise bland world.

Ask a third generation to speak a lick of their heritage and they'll shrug but ask them to sing along to their blood's music and you'll hear such a perfect pronunciation, it was almost as if their parents never failed them.

Tempos, both fast and strong, make a heartbeat wild and the adrenaline rises in one's blood. Basket cases find comfort in the darkness of their room, they're having their own disco inside their head, their own personal frat party. Sometimes, you don't need an invitation or a fancy get-up to enjoy music. You don't need an artificial understanding of belonging if the music cradles you in its symphony. Sometimes, you don't even need anyone to sing-a-long. Just the music. Just the beat. Just the jam.

It makes you taste iron on the weights you train on, makes you feel sick to your stomach when you face the mirror. Music makes you fucking feel.

It's beautiful.

Music is beautiful. It makes you pour your desolate heart out, ripped out from your chest by your bare hands. Staining them with the pumping, sweet melody so you can paint the misery on a dance floor canvas.

But in Bruce's case, nothing was beautiful. There were no smoking hot babes crowding his frame as he danced, no choirs praising his ears for his journey, no triumphal drums rumbling his victories as a teen.

Music can be so beautiful. However, it can be so harmful. Evidently, listening at max volume does hurt you. Funnily enough, Bruce doesn't listen to music unless Alfred turns it on.

The ringing wouldn't stop.

Hands over ears, hair being pulled so tight, strands fell on the floor to be forgotten. Body tense, hunched over a desk, a lone mug falling on the ground and its body collapsing as it collided with the floor. Its insides spilling on the wooden tiles, dancing into every nook and cranny. Bruce felt tears appear in the corner of his eyes, his nose dripping with something akin to blood but surely it's just mucus.

It hurts.

It hurts to think, to feel, his body continues to throw fits of tremors down his spine and make home in his brain. A vibration, deep inside his throat and chest, leaves his mouth ajar as he grunts through the spasms. A tingling through his rib cage, it grips his heart in its metaphysical hand. "Alf..." He gagged on the cry for help, the sound deafening and his lips numbing. "Alfred!" He yelped, his stomach churning and twisting onto itself. A split down the middle of his cranium is what he felt, as if someone took a hatchet and cracked his skull to see the inside. He whimpered as the ringing became louder, more pitiful.