loss

It finally hit me, just now, what i lost today. I lost the source of my greatest happiness this quarter. The reason i have been so happy this quarter was not the light course load, not the beautiful winter, not the ice-skating, not even getting accepted to grad schools. No it is what i lost just 9 hours ago. I am crying.

As if on purpose my headphones also broke. I swear the world likes taunting me with symbolism.

Still i want to end this post on the bright side. My good friend comforted me greatly and even gave me her headphones. And well you know that means that the greatest source of happiness in LIFE is still strong: I have great friends. And if by any chance one of my friends is reading this i just want to say, I love you.        

Chronicles of broken sound.

A bit more than a year and a half ago my headphones broke. At the time i was using an old iPod that my grandma gave me to listen to my music. I am not sure how, there was really no definable cause, but all of the sudden, one day, out of the blue, sound stopped coming out of one of the ear-buds. I was left with half the sound. Incomplete. 

It was the beginning of spring quarter of my second year. I went on that way, listening to half the music, only the lyrics to one song or only the strings to another, one ear blasted with sound the other empty, completely out of harmony and un-unified, for the rest of the quarter. when the quarter ended i went home to Miami  I tried to find a pair of headphones in my house, but failed. All of them had very low sound quality, airplane headphones, as if the sound came from a million mile away. Soon i left on an airplane headed to Chile.

When i got to Chile and began working in the lab i decided i have had enough of this. I grabbed my headphones, striped them down, cut them up, and soldered them back together. I fixed the mother fuckers. for the rest of the time in Chile i had full music one again. 

After the summer it was a new year a new quarter. Fall. Beautiful fall. And how do i start it? Obviously i proceed to lose my newly fixed headphones. Luckily i found some BAMF over-ear headphones at my grandmas. Now i had it good. But it seems i just could not hold on to such fullness of sound for long. It was a tough stressful quarter and i coped by biting my headphone wires. Soon i bit though one of the wires and was left with only half of myself. This time i would not let it stand. With the memory of fixing my headphones at my disposal i charged into my lab, cut them open, and broke out the solder. So began the endless battle of fixing and breaking that only ended a week ago with a total break. The headphones are now reduced to mere earmuffs. That quarter had its ups and downs. 

The quarter ended in catastrophe. I blame the lint. I noticed a buildup of lint inside of the iPod. I thought nothing of it. lint is lint is harmless i thought. I was wrong. one day i plugged in the headphones and no sound came out. no sound at all. The headphone jack was broken! The source of sound was broken. nothing came out out it. that was the end of all sound for a while.

At this point i was obsessed with fixing my sound problems. A headphone jack is one small part of an iPod. I could fix it, just you watch. And by god i did! Back home over winter break i found a broken iPod from years past. The hard-drive was dead. The headphone jack should still work. With the help of my dad i ripped apart both iPods and replaced the headphone jack. success. It will take more than lint to make me lose my music. 

There was however still a problem: the cable connecting the headphone jack to the hard-drive was kinda loose. Every now and then it would disconnect and i would have to rip though the exterior of the device to its heart and manually plug it back in. I could live with that. Only i did not notice, or more correctly noticed all to well, that it started happening more frequently and along with this it started to shut off randomly. The light of my lyrical life was liberality flickering. By the end of spring it turned off and could not be turned back on again. I had lost not only the source of the beautiful sound but the content of that sound. Whats left after that? Emptiness? Silence? My own isolated thoughts? What good is any of that? All was not lost, before the end i got a backup of my music onto my computer. Still being confined to my computer, to my lonely room, is no way to live. 

Salvation came that summer from my uncle. Hearing of my troubles he gave me his old iPhone. And with it came a shit-ton of new sounds. All his music was still on it. So much to explore and so much to hear. TThe battle still raged with my headphones but that was manageable. All was well.  And well, i needed those sounds. This past fall was rough. So many dreadful troubles. Without access to beautiful sound i might have lost my mind much sooner.

The strain of that fall was too much... I was drowning. I would plug in my headphones and out of one ear-bud the sound came from underwater. A little twist would fix this problem and bring it back to full clarity. But i knew that the twist was nothing more than plugin my ears to the drowning man's pleas. Soon enough the man died. No sound came from the that ear-bud anymore. The headphone jack was once again broken. The source of half my music is gone.   

Nothing left to do now but accept it. Its broken. No fixing this. The headphone battle is a lost. Now, I went out and bought some cheap headphones from the store. Using them at the computer. 

A strange thing has been happening of late. Every now and then, as i am walking, listening to my broken music, hearing my half sounds, for a brief moment a flood of music comes over both ears. For a fleeting moment i can hear the full harmony. I am awash in Awe. I try to hold still. I try to hold onto the fullness for as long as i can. But i always lose it. And quickly too. I have accepted that its broken. But now I can't help but hope as I walk, for those brief moments when everything comes together again. 

Those brief moments are not without their pain. Because i know its broken, because i have accepted that its broken, i know the moment will pass. But even knowing that i stand still, hold my breath, and try to hold on.          

Well that's the end.

By the way in case anyone reading this is too thick to figure it out, this is not just about broken electronics.