http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_zLOnDnFpw
The winter between 2011—2012; I am stranded at a train station on the NJT, trying to make my way back to New York City. The sun set a while back; my backpack is high and dry, but the rest of me is soaked in snow. The trains are delayed; my train comes but skips the station. I have enough time to make it home, sure; and enough iPod battery as well. But my phone is dead, and I'm hungry and broke. And when the train comes, it whisks me through industrial towns and over swamp and underground, and there are lights and homes of towns I couldn't name, and this song is playing, and I experience frisson — sustained, continuous awareness, a heightened sense of being, fueled by hormones, hunger, exhaustion, anxiety, and this music, this incredible music, had I really never heard a cappella before this? Had I really never heard this song before? What have I been doing, where have I been? In this spark, this moment of enlightenment, everything else seems dull: going to school the next day and suffering through US History is dull, eating lunch in the lunchroom is dull, and only by listening to the song again can I bring back a small fraction of the butterflies in my stomach.
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