A love letter to music and escapism

It’s been a long day at school. In the yellow light of the train, your sweaty hand grips the handlebar as you’re jostled occasionally by someone’s gigantic backpack. The commuters are packed like sardines in the carriage. Standing shoulder to shoulder, back to back, you can almost smell the breath of the person an inch away from you. For the fifth time that day, you lament forgetting to bring your earphones.

(image from Persona 5)

You spend the rest of the journey staring into the shoulder blades of the person in front of you. You could have doom scrolled on your phone, but the connection is bad underground. But you have nothing else to do, so you whip out your phone for the umpteenth time. You load and reload Instagram, staring at the infuriating blank screen. When you finally get home, you slump into your bed and doze off, grateful for the temporary reprieve that sleep offers to you.

Life is filled with countless tiring moments, and we all turn to escapism so we don’t have to face those moments head-on. For me, those moments concentrate when I wait. Waiting to get home, waiting for the bus, waiting in the queue. While I wait, I look upon the sea of heads and this feeling of hopelessness descends upon me. Is this what adulthood is? A constant repetition of waiting and working, with no end in sight? Is adulthood all about waking up, braving the hordes of people at the station, then tapping away at the computer for hours, every single day for the rest of your life? “If so, I don’t want to grow up!” I mentally shout at myself whenever I envision my future like that.

But those bad days fade into the background when I think of the good days. When I am strolling along the river with no destination in mind, head gently nodding along to music. When the early sun shines its rays at me while I water my plants. When I am curled up in my chair reading a good book. When I take life slowly, when I exist in my own space and in my own time. In these moments, I cherish life. Like a new bud sprouting from the decay of old leaves, escaping into my own world injects hope back into the dreariness of life.

(’First Light Over Tranquil Waters’ by Paul Batch)

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I discovered the joy of music at a relatively older age than my peers. The first time I plugged my wired earphones into my iPhone 6S and stuck them into my ears, I was in secondary school. I remember sitting on the bus on the way home after school, blasting rhythm game music while slouching lazily in the seat. As teenagers often do, I thought smugly to myself that I must have looked so cool and mysterious like that.

In school, I wore earphones a lot not only because they looked cool (I really cared about external validation), but also because music helped lessen the ache of loneliness that I often felt back then. Many times, it was my only companion. Over the years, my choice of genres changed and I gained more friends, but music as a form of escapism remained constant. It was partly because of the everyday stresses, but mostly because I simply could not live a day without music anymore.

On the train this time, I remember to bring my noise-cancelling earphones. As I put them on, the overwhelming clamour of noises around me is cut off. The music flows into my ears and my spirits lift a little. My heart beats in tandem with the song’s rising and ebbing. Suddenly the world seems less loud and imposing and it feels as if I could take on the day, maybe even another. The emotion in the singer's voice accompanies me as I walk through life feeling the myriad of human emotions, from blissful to melancholic. There's something about the way they croon into my ears that makes me feel as though I'm not the only one feeling this way.

My anxieties slowly dissipate and I stare out the window at the passing scenery. Paired with the R&B, these moments sometimes feel like the end credits of my life. In this space in time, I feel nostalgic for the lives that I never lived. The experiences I turned down. But I also feel a surge of creativity. I feel the urge to write poems and stories, to wax lyrical about the way the trees sway in the gentle wind, or the way the water ripples and gleams in the light of the sun. I long to draw the scene in front of me, and to learn the guitar chords for the song in my ears. For me, music is the key that opens the door to escapism. What does music do for you?