Listening to Roll My Blues by Jolie Holland

Have you ever walked by a stranger's home, seen the front door ajar, and heard people laughing inside? Maybe there wasn't laughter but an overpowering smell. Vanilla, or cinnamon, or cake or cookies. Tonight I was walking home in the rain. I was leaving work. The train took forever, but all in all, there was nothing to complain about. Sometimes you just stumble into the dissonance of a life you may have dreamed of and the life that you find yourself living. Now, as a child and adult, I have never been a "planner." There has been little in my life that I have set out to do and then doggedly pursued. I never had a life plan or an agenda that I had set up for myself. And, I don't really believe that I imagined what my life would be like in my twenties when I was a child. But the twenties will be ending in just a couple of short years and I keep finding myself questioning which direction the conductor of this train is going. Or even if there is a conductor. Sometimes I feel like that for better or worse life just buoys you along and you find yourself in the midst of "decisions" but never anything severe enough to merit any real deliberation.
Sigh. Such a great word - deliberation.
And this strange dissonance, call it recognized determinism, can create such a yearning in a person. Mind you - it isn't a desire for that cliche paradigm the "grass is greener." Nor is it a recognition of the choices we could have made in our past. It is simply the strange comparison of our imagined lives versus our real life. And I am not even talking about fantasy.
For example - have you ever spoken to someone on the phone without ever having been to their house? Do you picture what their room is like? Their front door? Their kitchen? There are entire imagined living spaces that don't even exist. And then when you finally arrive at these places to you try to compare the imagined living space with what you actually see? I do it all the time. What is explained to me is oftentimes very different from what I see before me. Sometimes it is a let down, other times I am pleasantly surprised.
Well, I think the same can be said about our lives. We have envisioned what and who we may have been and as we get closer to that thing, that person, we sometimes run into that strange shimmering dissonance. Like watching heat rise off of pavement. Things blur momentarily and then re-focus.
And sometimes when things come clearly into view, we are walking home alone in the rain after working at a bar in the greatest city on Earth. And it is not the judgement that matters here, it is the yearning. The yearning for all of that dissonant music to just once be in unison, or at least an understandable harmony.