Mayluna

by Kelley McNeil

He often said that time travel was more accessible to us than we realize, and that music is one of the ways we do it. He’s right, I think. After all, few things have the ability to transport us so completely and powerfully as the sound of the perfect, meaningful song. The music of our lifetime is woven into the fabric of our existence, our own personal soundtrack behind our stories. Maybe it takes us to a memory, an echo of something that once was, or maybe to a place where we can live out an imagined dream.

Here we were, these two people who had been walking along in life, on two different continents, neither of us knowing the other existed and yet somehow knowing all along. In totally different worlds. And then in a moment, our paths cross and nothing is ever the same.” Two points of light, finally meeting.

Happiness can be an elusive thing and certainly isn’t always linked to success.”

Children don’t know who their parents are, really. Don’t know the secrets and dreams that lie deep within their hearts. They know the faces of the parents who raised them, but not the struggles and demons and things that make their hearts sing.

Sometimes you have to do that—take the thing about you that makes you the saddest and learn to spin it into a superpower.

So Mayluna was interesting to me, you see. The secret formula seemed to be that they masterfully combined the edginess of moody, alternative rock guitar with a little more emotional depth, stirring melodies and endlessly tortured lyrics penned by their stylishly brooding and somewhat mysterious lead singer.

The most pivotal days of a person’s life often start out just like any other. You wake up, brush your teeth, and go about your usual routines, having no idea that by the time you go to bed that night, your entire path will have changed.

We didn’t feel like strangers, but rather like we’d found someone who had been missing for a lifetime and then suddenly there they were. Puzzle pieces sliding into place, my nervous system both stirring and calming in the most remarkable way in his unusual presence.

It was as if someone had given him a manual—a playbook of things to say. He had an uncanny way of making comments that felt like a vitamin I hadn’t realized I’d been deficient in. Nourishing.

We were these two damaged people coming together, with scars and wounds that ran deep. We had reason to stay apart. But it was inevitable.

As I looked at him, I realized that it was his eyes that had disarmed me from the beginning—so full of pain and hope and a deep heart that was filled with kindness and romance and belief in things far beyond this world. When he turned them toward me, time stopped.

I should have known then—that we were completing each other in all the most dangerous ways. Trying to heal old, deep wounds in a shared sadness of the past together with the hopeful belief that we would somehow fix each other. Two puzzle pieces, matched together from lifetimes before.

He felt familiar and new and like someone I’d known in every lifetime, if I believed in such things. When he was gone, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. And when he was with me, I felt completely alive. It was too much. I know that now, of course. It’s dangerous to love like that. To spend years wishing more than anything that you could go back to a night, standing barefoot with a guitar calling you like a siren song.