small dark rooms

Each chapter in my life so far seems to have themes attached to the memories. Sometimes the theme is a colour or feeling, sometimes its a group of people or a place. This piece, small dark rooms, comes from a chapter in my life that was filled with time spent in spaces that were small and without much natural light. 

Up until I was 18, most of my life was spent outside. As a child I almost always played outside, and as a teenager I spent a lot of time in the outdoors and playing outdoor sports. While there was plenty of time spent inside playing music and learning at school, I feel like it was a healthy balance that made me feel good. Yet when I went to university to study music, a choice that resulted in spending most of my time indoors, it didn't click until much later that this could have been a reason  why I didn't feel good during most of the year and a half I spent studying. 

The themes of that chapter in my life draws on memories of the practice rooms I used to play or write music in for several hours a day. To access these rooms you either had to walk down a flight of stairs that felt like descending into a basement, or enter through a heavy side door that felt like walking into to a cave. Despite being illuminated by bright, white lighting, the lack of natural light made it feel dark, while the damp smell and concrete walls did well to snuff out the smalls whispers of inspiration I was chasing. 

During most of this time I lived in the delightfully quirky yet damp, cold and mouldy Wellington suburb of Aro Valley. 40 Holloway Road. The first flat that my flatmates and I had ever lived in. Needless to say is was exactly what you want from a student flat in Wellington; architecturally questionable, insulation deprived, proudly single glazed, and with enough steps to make you second guess your decision to move out. If it wasn't for the good humans I lived with, I wouldn't be looking back on those memories as fondly as I do now. 

My life during this chapter was a yo-yo between the small dark room I lived in to the small dark rooms I studied in. No time for the outdoors, no time for what makes me feel good. I know it sounds like it was all doom and gloom but there were some rays of sunshine. And one shone particularly brightly. Claire had been one of my closest friends since I started studying, and we'd been flatting together for five or so months before we broke the first rule of flatmates. We skipped the awkward dating stage entirely; one day we were single, the next we were inseparable. During the first few moments of our relationship, while we both still studied music at the same place, many of our days ended in one of us finding our way to the other one's practice room where we'd chat and play music. I loved sitting at the piano while looking at Claire, playing whatever came out of my fingers. On one particular evening, the main tune you can hear at the beginning and the end of small dark rooms came into existence and has stuck with me all these years, becoming known as Claire's song. 

Just like this tune stuck with me, so too did I to Claire. Even though our lives look completely different to how they looked back then, the little motif has stayed the same. It was only recently that I wrote the middle section of small dark rooms, and now I can see with a wider perspective  how I am now and how I was then, there is a symmetric opposition between the two sections. The first section was written in a small dark room yet sounds wistfully hopeful, aching with love and with thoughts of a future together. The middle section was written in a room that is warm and catches the late afternoon sun that lands on my back as I play the piano, yet the music is full of longing and sadness as I recall the chapter in my life where rays of sunshine were few and far between. 

Its a sad song, with rays of sunshine speckled throughout, and it helps me identify what is important to me during the different chapters of my life.