Unfettered and alive
Dec. 6th, 2021 07:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: amnesia, (arguably) embarrassment squick]
(I have been wavering on whether to post this draft for months. But then I wrote the previous post, and it occurred to me: this is a time that I felt particularly alive, and it wasn't dangerous at all.)
---
It was a slow evening at work, and the radio was playing Saturday Night Classics.
A song came on that I recognised as being on one of the mix CDs my parents used to play on long car trips. Though I could not remember any of the words, (and many of them were hard to make out on the radio,) there was a strong sense of familiarity.
And then I heard the first line of the chorus:
I was a free man in Paris, I felt unfettered and alive--
--and, to my immense delight, the rest of the chorus came to me, still there somewhere deep in my brain.
Singing a little ahead of the radio, to prove to myself that I could, I sang along:
There was nobody calling me up for favours, nobody's future to decide
You know I'd go back there tomorrow, but for the work I've taken on
Working the star-maker machinery, behind the popular song
---
(It occurred to me on my way home that it was *stoking* the star-maker machinery, but on the other hand I did figure that out in the end. Apparently it's also "and no one's future to decide", which seems obviously inferior in terms of parallelism and I have no idea why they went with that phrasing. In any case, I was damn close given how very long it's been and how very young I was. (Young enough that at the time I could not parse what they meant by that last line.))
---
The song, as such, is just kind of okay. It's not the song per se that's important, but the principle of the thing. In that moment, I felt *whole*.
(I have been wavering on whether to post this draft for months. But then I wrote the previous post, and it occurred to me: this is a time that I felt particularly alive, and it wasn't dangerous at all.)
---
It was a slow evening at work, and the radio was playing Saturday Night Classics.
A song came on that I recognised as being on one of the mix CDs my parents used to play on long car trips. Though I could not remember any of the words, (and many of them were hard to make out on the radio,) there was a strong sense of familiarity.
And then I heard the first line of the chorus:
I was a free man in Paris, I felt unfettered and alive--
--and, to my immense delight, the rest of the chorus came to me, still there somewhere deep in my brain.
Singing a little ahead of the radio, to prove to myself that I could, I sang along:
There was nobody calling me up for favours, nobody's future to decide
You know I'd go back there tomorrow, but for the work I've taken on
Working the star-maker machinery, behind the popular song
---
(It occurred to me on my way home that it was *stoking* the star-maker machinery, but on the other hand I did figure that out in the end. Apparently it's also "and no one's future to decide", which seems obviously inferior in terms of parallelism and I have no idea why they went with that phrasing. In any case, I was damn close given how very long it's been and how very young I was. (Young enough that at the time I could not parse what they meant by that last line.))
---
The song, as such, is just kind of okay. It's not the song per se that's important, but the principle of the thing. In that moment, I felt *whole*.
