My speakers don’t work. 

July of 2019 will forever mark the day that the speakers in my car stopped working. A stutter and a spit of musical tunes shot out one morning, unknowingly uttering the last words that they would ever speak. 

I have listened to music in the car for as long as I can remember. Snippets of Vampire Weekend and KT Tunstell shuffled from the iPod Nano flutter around my head, visions of my days as a backseat DJ. 

My parents sitting patiently through all of my obscure music phases, listening quietly, never talking during songs that they knew were my favorites. 

Victoria. My own car. My first car. My own personal concert every morning and every night. Drives don’t seem as long when you have Alt-J and Mumford and Sons and Bon Iver to keep you company. 

The nervous drives in winter. The tear-filled ones during times of heartbreak. The warm nights with the windows down and hands out the window. The time I picked up my first passenger. Each (failed) attempt at parallel parking. 

All of these memories are populated by music. A soundtrack to the most mundane part of my day. My speakers witnessed all of the firsts and all of the lasts. They were quiet when I needed them to be and loud just when I wanted them. 

Now, their forced silence is deafening. 

Silence is louder when you wish there was noise. 

My speakers don’t work. My morning drives are now inhabited by the hum of an engine as old as me. My teary-eyed journeys are no longer accompanied by the companion of a song. My hand still flutters out the window, but there is no music to sway and move to. 

The world seems less magical when there’s no song to back it up. Dark drives become eerie. Bright drives become unbearable. 

The music is no longer emitted from the boombox that resides near my knees. Now you can hear it from a new source, one that sings loudly even without tunes to back her up. 

How does one relearn what makes things beautiful? 

When all of the background noise has ceased and after the world has gone to bed, beauty remains. 

The morning fog rolling from the lowlands of a forested drive still settles peace into my mind. The way that the stoplights shines red and green into my face still feels like a spotlight just for me. The sleepy lull of morning traffic still allows me to sneak a peek into the lives of others during the split second that our eyes connect across the lanes. My hand still finds its way out the window, the wind becoming the catalyst for all swooping and swaying. My eyes and ears have adjusted; the delicacy of the world is now only enhanced with music, not relied upon. 

My speakers in my car don’t work; now my own speakers have to.