Old Songs Sung to Old Friends

Names in this story have been changed for privacy reasons.

A memory came back to me today and I want to try to pin it down before it flies away again, because it holds a bit of magic. A few years ago, I was sitting at the bus stop across from my apartment building on a mild, early winter day. I usually would have had my chunky black headphones on, but for whatever reason, I didn’t that day. The bus stop was just a strip of sidewalk, with a ledge of concrete, a nice perch to sit. As I checked my phone for the time and scanned the spot down the street where my bus would round the bend, a stranger who sat a few yards away, began singing. I turned, and as our eyes connected, I was startled to see that he was singing directly to me. In between that moment, and the one where I recognized the song he sang, my world spun off kilter. Because the song he sang was one that I had written years and years ago. One I hadn’t heard in a very long time. One I had forgotten.

Downtown Hartford, 2020

“Where did you hear that?” I demanded. He only continued to sing my own lyrics back to me. “How do you know that song?” He smiled, still singing. And that’s when I recognized him. Time had changed him, but his smile was the same. “Kurt!” I half-yelled. And the melody came to a halt.

I forget how I had met him. My early twenties are a blur. But I remember being in his cramped studio apartment, sitting on the edge of his bed with my guitar in hand, while he tinkered away at his computer, not a foot away as he recorded my song. And sitting at that bus stop, it occurred to me as I stared at him in awe, as I took in his crumpled clothes and matted hair, and returned his blinding smile, that he must have spent time listening to that recording in order to have learned the lyrics by heart to recite them to me. And the idea that art could work like that - to have left my mind completely, forgotten by time, only to be absorbed and replayed, and maybe even cherished by his - it struck me as nothing short of miraculous.

In the time that it took for my bus to come, we had a very enthusiastic, but brief conversation. I learned that he had been having a hard time and was experiencing homelessness. He gave me his phone number and I boarded the bus, waving goodbye. During the bus ride, memories started coming back from the time when I had met him. I remembered that he was one of the first people who I had told about my disorder. “Oh, I have bipolar disorder too,” he had replied with a shrug. I was new to the diagnosis at that time, still shoving it away and skipping my meds, wrestling with intense mood swings and running, running, running. I didn’t want to believe that I had this illness, and here was this person who accepted it with ease.

The summer before this chance encounter at the bus stop, I had had a very bad, very intense manic episode that landed me in the hospital for a month. My mania was like a tornado, and it had blown straight through the heart of my family. For a week or so, I didn’t know where I would live when I got out of the hospital. As I watched Park Street fly past the windows of the bus, I felt for him. I called his number. That night, he fell asleep sitting upright on my couch, shoes still on, like the warmth and softness was something he hadn’t experienced in a long time. My heart broke. I made him scrambled eggs the next morning, and then he was gone again. I regret not being able to do more for him at the time.

I picked up the guitar today to try to remember how that song goes. It’s a song for outcasts, for people who feel like they’re on the fringe. For the people who burn too brightly, and then burn out, and then find peace in small moments of fleeting beauty. And that’s what Kurt did for me. I hope I did the same for him.