Penury’s Song

The familiar whistling of Andrew Bird’s melodic tune, “Dark Matter” rushes through my earpods as we push back from the gate, sending a wave of chills over my forearms and straight through to my spine.

It’s going to be alright, I say to myself as I close my eyes and turn up the song.

“Do you wonder where the Self resides? Is it in your head or between your sides?” Andrew Bird asks as we lift off and my heart feels suddenly lighter than air.

I’m leaving this place. Marie will love me again because I’m moving from Los Angeles to Sydney, and I’m starting a whole new life with her and the boys. I can forget all about the Army.

There’s always been something ethereal and therefore very profound to me about Andrew Bird’s music. Perhaps it’s because someone very special to me introduced me to him when we were both in the military, and it has continued to influence me deeply ever since.

And does the thought of bile that’s red and black

The thought of tongues that taste you back

Fill you with a nauseouseous sort of elation

My thoughts continue to meander. I dream of seeing Marie’s shining bright blue eyes beaming at me as I hurry through the crowd to greet her. I’m 20, and at the time, I believe I am in love with a kind, funny and genuinely alrtuistic woman who loves Star Trek just as much as I do. She’s even told me she loves me in letters she sent me while I was in Basic.

But none of this was so.

Marie told me she was bicurious-not bisexual-and could not be with a woman because it would be too difficult to have to explain to people.

Essentially, I’d just been some fantasy and now that I was really doing what she’d said all along—move there—it was real. Too real, at least it was for her.

Andrew Bird never read this and I may never meet him, but I want to share why and how "Dark Matter" changed my life. Much of it has to do with pure luck, or perhaps G-d's Hand was in it. In either case, it was serendipitous the way it happened to be that song of all songs.

If it hadn't been for someone I cared about like as sister in the Army, I'd never know about Andrew Bird, and I'd never have had the courage to get on a plane at 20 years old and move to the other side of the world for love. "Dark Matter" was a clarion call for me to discover what it meant for me to be an individual again. I was going to rediscovery myself. Wait, but who was I? I had joined the Army at a young age, and my experiences had left such a deep and indellible mark on my psychology, I simply didn't know. I was too young to really know, but I had somehow talked myself into believing that I should know.

It's the one question that Bird asks in "Dark Matter" I've been asking all my life, and I, too, have always been fascinated by what's really going on inside.

Where does my identity come from? Is it solid? Is it okay for it to be something that moves, shifts and is shaped over the course of my lifetime? Aren't our identities simply collections of experiences, choices and impressions? Are they driven by our emotions or by reason? Is there a right or a wrong answer? Who gets to decide what the right and wrong answers are?

"Do you wonder where the Self resides? Is it in your head or between your sides and who will be the one who will decide its true location?"

-Andrew Bird, "Dark Matter"

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