Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

–Victor Hugo

Music is the blood that pumps through our veins as we trudge down the hall. There is nothing most of us would rather do but disappear into our music and let the rest of the world fade away, but we are shunned for such things since it is disrespectful to the others around us. Music is one reason that some of us are still here today because it showed us that we are not alone in the world and there are others that feel the same way we do. Plenty of senseless music screams for us to hate and abuse but there are others that whisper like a siren in the night that we are who we are and there is nothing that we can not do with our lives. The lives we live are ours and ours alone, so block everything else out and focus on yourself before you focus on others.

“It will tear you apart,” I was told once. “Caring about everybody else before yourself will tear you apart piece by piece until there is nothing left but the bones that you were built with.”

“I know,” I said back to them.

“Then why is that you keep doing it?” I shrugged and looked them dead in the eye.

“What if I could have done something for them and I didn’t step up in time?”

Guilt is one thing that carries heaviest in our chests as we look around at everyone else. Guilt for something, someone. There is nothing that can make it go away, but the music that we listen to lightens it for two to five minutes at a time. There is nothing that cannot be put into words, they may not be yours, but they’re there nonetheless. Music carries us past the darkness that consumes us at least once a day.

There is music that brings us and music that breaks us down again. Over and over, we put ourselves through it to see that there is such a thing as pain and happiness within everything else that happens around us. Break up songs, even if you haven’t felt the pain, can either pump you up with anger and happiness or shoot you down to a new depth that you didn’t know was possible while listening to a song. There are so many things that music is screaming, shouting, whispering, and crying out.

Music is the voice that speaks when we cannot. It is the voice that digs deeper than anyone else can before bursting at the seems to engulf you with its flames until you are reborn into someone new. Someone better.

Listen to your heart and listen to the music that guides it, because “it ain’t the speakers that bump our hearts, it’s our hearts that make the beat.” (Holding onto You by twenty one pilots).