collision

Tonight my worlds collided. My new world collided with my old world, in the form of the NW Symphonic Band tour to WA.

I have been waiting for tonight for six months. And I knew that the fact that I have put so much emotion into awaiting it would make it rather anti-climatic. And anti-climatic it was. I saw a friend who is still in the band which was what made it worth it. And the music was, of course, awesome. I talked to a handful of people that I used to know, talked to the band director and his wife. I smiled a lot, I was moved by the music.

And I left feeling so incredibly torn. For a short hour I was transported back into an old world. A world I used to be so very much a part of. My life is entirely different now on almost every level, and it is so good. But that old life was also good.

I wouldn't call it homesick. It's more sickness for a past that I will never get back. Tonight I was given a visual reminder of the world I left behind when I graduated from college in December of 2009. Most of the people were still the same, the band functioned in the same way, did the same things. And yet, I was on the outside looking in. The freshmen didn't know me. I no longer belong in that world...that world that used to mean so much to me is gone forever. It's not like being homesick - I can always go home and visit and it'll still be there. But college, in the form I knew it, will never ever be there again. If I went back to visit this spring, 90% of the people that were important to me during my time at NW would be gone. If I went back a year from now, that number would increase to pretty much 100%, with the exception of a very few people.

I don't usually mourn college for that very reason. I don't wish I could visit because if I did visit, it wouldn't be the college I knew and loved. The people would be very painfully absent. But tonight the band came to my new home, and that band was almost the same as it was when I was last a member. That made it all the harder. Not because I'm super close friends with any of them, but because they are the same. And, even so, I don't belong. Maybe I never did. But I at least belonged to the music. The music became a part of my soul...the music is still tied to me...when I hear the songs we played, my heart is transported back to those days when I was a member of the NW Symphonic Band - those days when we toured Mexico, those days when we all got food poisoning in a little Dutch town in California. And intricately connected to those memories is the music that we carried with us, the music that will never leave us. The music that we poured months into preparing - the music that carried us beyond the mundane and beyond the present, to a realm that will always survive in the memories we carry with us.

Tonight I remember and I mourn. With that mourning is happiness, though, because I am mourning something inexpressibly beautiful.