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Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Don't Close Your Eyes...

Isn't it the strangest thing when, going about your day cheerfully, you suddenly find yourself singing just a single snatch of a song?

There's a phrase, just a few words or a set of striking chords, and for no evident reason it sings itself in the back of your mind, over and over.

When this happens to me the song always seems to be unrelated to what I'm doing, and often even to what I'm thinking. Sometimes I remember the words slightly incorrectly, and then I spend the rest of the day trying to place what song they're from. They're rarely words from the chorus, but sometimes. A few weeks ago, I found myself singing a phrase I couldn't turn up anywhere on Google, and I finally resorted to combing my music collection looking for anything remotely in the right genre.

I found the song, but the oddest thing is what also often happens with these random recollections - it was a song I hadn't heard in months. Sometimes I wonder if perhaps it's all a trick of my subconscious, if I've heard the tail end of something on the radio recently, or the relevant snatch played in a store, perhaps. But sometimes I know that cannot be the case.

This song snatch from a couple weeks ago came, it turned out, off of an album I downloaded from an independent gothic artist six months or more ago, and hadn't listened to since then. It just sung its way into my head some day, and stayed there...(and I was rather glad, because I had forgotten all about the beautiful goth album, which I still quite like. I will quite seriously try listening to anything but rap.)

Anyway, today's edition was another song I had forgotten the existence of, and so it was beautiful to rediscover it today.

I found myself randomly singing a breathy, easy, soft "Don't close your eyes..."

Just that. Peaceful, as if soft summer sunset lights were glowing through moving white curtains. It made me smile to sing it, but I could not for the life of me place it.

Google was not immediately helpful, and I struggled for hours faking the next words until I finally found it -

It's a compelling corruption of the chorus to Taylor Swift and the Civil Wars' "Safe and Sound," from the Hunger Games movie, which I have never seen. I remember watching the "Safe and Sound" video, though, loving its soft, vintage colors, thinking it was an awfully sad yet comforting song, beautiful, far away and yet raw.

The line there says:
"Just close your eyes / the sun is going down / you'll be alright / no one can hurt you now. / Come morning light / you and I'll be safe and sound."

It seemed an odd choice for my head to make for me, lately. I've been feeling a lot more like Taylor Swift's catchy, party-on and live free tune "22," frankly! But perhaps that's why I switched the words...

The original "just close your eyes" is a waiting voice, one that quietly hides itself and wishes nothing was coming. One that is overwhelmed.

"Don't close your eyes" is the voice of quiet, anticipatory joy that doesn't want to miss a minute of the wonder surrounding it.

As I come into the last few months of my senior year here at TU, every moment feels precious. Every spring breeze (or, you know, frigid spring raindrop) is one of the last I will feel on campus as an undergrad student. Every all-night chat or all-day coffee outing or interminable text-messaging spree or random outing to the country with friends is a jewel crowning my final undergrad days - an almost-last opportunity to do what's been done a million times before in exactly the same way or to try something I always planed to do and hadn't gotten around to.

With a plan for next year, a fair amount of scholastic satisfaction now, ever-deepening relations with the best friends in the universe (in and out of Tulsa!), and with a greater amount of peace and assurance in Christ than I've felt for most of my slightly-neurotic college career, I feel the security of the "safe and sound" bit.

Perhaps it only remains for me to smile as I did when singing, and to never close my waiting eyes...

http://youtu.be/RzhAS_GnJIc