16
" You don't know what to do with the jam jar, the chicken stink, the sinister mountain fog that is everywhere, but the adults pretend to ignore when you are in the room. It seems the only thing you can do is listen for it. You hear it in the four measures of Vivaldi's "Winter" that you can still remember from Sarah and the Squirrel, and once you make the connection between the music and mountain fog you play the notes over and over again inside your head.
You paw up the trash-strewn ravine. The sky is low and gray, the color of the cinder blocks the men in your town manufacture from ash and dust. The dirt-filled strawberry jam jar is in your denim coat pocket. Vivaldi is in your head. The music you hear is like the blaze-orange clothing the men wear on the mountainsides while deer hunting in autumn. The music is like a bulletproof vest, a coiled copperhead, a rabies shot. The music is both a warning and a talisman. The music tells you things: You're not imagining this. Better children than you die in the snow for no reason.
The music says: What's hidden beneath this picture of strawberry jam?
The music says: This isn't a Disney movie. Death doesn't just take the wicked villain. Look at that dirt in the jar. It will take you. It will take everyone, and everyone, and everyone.
The music says: What you feel is real. Follow me. Run. "
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman , Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir
17
" Somewhere in the back of her disaster brain--the brain that is firing the wrong signals, that tells her she is not running from a bear but already being devoured by it--she is learning something important. And the lesson is this: There is something in the world far more terrifying than humiliation or failure or death. And it is just like FDR said: Fear itself. And if she doesn't murder the bastard, this archvillain called Fear, she's going to be toast for real. She doesn't yet have a plan for vanquishing him. She has yet to learn about psychiatric remedies. She doesn't yet know why Fear has chosen this moment in her life to make his sudden entrance, licking his chops. For the early twenties, a particularly cruel age to be struck down by fear, is a stage in life when tremendous bravery is required of a woman -- the bravery to discover what she wants, what she cannot abide, what she needs to make a living and be among the living.
But she knows this: A million times more than any other emotion or experience, fear has the strength and ability to mangle her into something different from what she truly is, something phony and fake and cowardly. And now, surprised and twisted and disoriented and broken as she is by fear's sudden arrival, she realizes that she needs to fight it, fight for her life. "
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman , Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir
19
" This was who The Composer was: A person who did not understand America's basic facts, but wholly and completely understood its deepest feelings, its most powerful fears and desires.
And I came to understand that I needed the same things, that the only way to surface from my own panic was to hope it was temporary. To hope that somewhere, in the future, was an older version of myself able to transform disasters into stories.
I look at her now, my younger self. She is working so hard at so many things. She's playing the violin underwater and wondering why no one can hear her. She has no idea why she has disaster-brain, no idea why she has lost the ability to know the most basic things about her own body. Still, she teaches me something important: In the midst of panic, something compels her to take a look around, to take note of her surroundings, to remember what she sees. "
― Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman , Sounds Like Titanic: A Memoir
