Where music finds us

When a Melody Finds UsThere are moments in life when words are no longer enough.Moments when everything we believed to be certain suddenly disappears beneath our feet, when a door closes, a person leaves, a dream collapses, or we find ourselves standing somewhere between the life we knew and a future we cannot yet imagine. In such moments, explanations often seem strangely powerless. People may tell us that everything will be all right, that time will heal us, that another opportunity will come or that we simply have to continue. Their intentions may be kind, but sometimes the heart cannot hear what words are trying to say.And then there is music.I have always found something extraordinary about the way a melody can reach places inside us that language cannot. A few notes can suddenly return us to a room we have not entered for forty years. A song can bring back the face of someone we thought we had almost forgotten. Music can make us remember the person we once were, or perhaps even awaken something within us that we have never understood before.But what if sometimes there is more to it?What if a melody appears when there is no logical reason for it to be there?What if an old cassette plays something that was never recorded onto it? What if music comes through a wall behind which there is no room, from a radio frequency where no station exists, or from an object that should have been silent for decades? What if, at precisely the moment when a human being believes there is nowhere left to go, something impossible begins to play?This book was born from that thought.The ten stories that follow are deliberately independent from one another. They are not pieces of one hidden puzzle, and the characters are not secretly connected. They come from different lives, different circumstances and different emotional worlds. Some are young, some are older. They carry different fears, losses, regrets and hopes. They will never meet one another, and what happens to one does not explain what happens to another.