Accordion Music

I am sitting here and it is past my usual bedtime. I am up because it is fall break and I have nothing ahead of me tomorrow but what I choose to set in front of myself. I am on-campus for the week and almost everyone else is gone. Today I struggled with that — the solitude I've been craving, the solitude I normally accept with a quiet kind of relief. I had anticipated days of knitting and relaxing, with time to think about the future, time to stretch out away from my weekly obligations and spin up a few dreams and distractions. But over the past few days I've been mired in anxiety and fear; struggling with something that, after building for weeks, finally burst out ... It still takes me by surprise, the unintentional harm that we can pass onto each other with good intentions. Parents to children, friends to friends, siblings to siblings, lovers to each other. Sometimes it makes you feel like something you counted on is suddenly tipping over, the boat is capsizing. It's unsettling and it hurts, especially when someone else is hurting too and you don't know what to do about it.
Then, of course, the storm (whichever one it happened to be) passes. Maybe you got fooled by the eye of the storm, and so the next wave hit you by surprise and made you wonder if it'll ever go away. But it does go away, even if you're left looking at a little, tiny bit of wreckage; a wee bit of re-ordering and re-evaluating to do.
Tonight, I had to force myself to get ready for bed, even though I felt wide awake. I kept wondering, why? How? How could this happen? I took a hot shower to calm down, told myself that everything is going to be okay, that nothing really important was lost. Some things just got shaken up a bit. Then, as I was about to get in bed, I heard music drifting in through my open window. No stereo, no tinned-up, pre-recorded stuff. It wasn't the dull booming music of a house party. Someone in the house across the way was playing the accordion in the darkness of their side porch. I couldn't see them, but I could hear the song clear across the night air, and it was the most beautiful, wistful thing because they kept fumbling at a certain part, stopping, starting again. As I listened, I knew it was a tune I knew but couldn't remember. I was transfixed. Maybe I only feel this way because it's late and because I'm tired and still a little upset, but at that moment the beautiful, lilting, stumbling accordion felt like it was life. Life in its stumbling awkward, breathtaking, intimate, grand, confusing, upsetting, frustrating, ecstatic, ho-hum kind of beauty.
Maybe faith means knowing that messing up doesn't ruin the song.