I heard it before I saw anything. A distinctive, bending guitar notes pouring through the late September air near Circus Maximus.
I stopped. My throat tightened. A tear surprised me.
Music stores thoughts and feelings we don’t realize we’ve kept.
Pink Floyd. David Gilmour.
That sound.
It had been thirty years since my ears experienced David Gilmour bend a note like light through marble. I was twenty-four then. I am fifty-four now.
The distance between those two ages suddenly felt measurable — in funerals attended, in voices gone quiet, in empty chairs at crowded tables at holidays.
When I last heard him live in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium — its rubble now resting on the bottom of Lake Erie, where fish drift through what was once a grandstand —my future stretched wide and unmarked.
My first job. First marriage. First apartment. My life in Russia. So many doors stood open then. Rooms I had not yet entered. Roads I had not yet taken.
In the decades since, many voices have gone quiet.
My mother…
