Our emotions are like stringed instruments. Each string produces a sound when played properly and that sound can resonate in so many ways, producing different reactions. The music produced by the stringed instruments of our emotions is a defining aspect of the human experience.
The problem is that we are not always sure, nor can we ever be sure which strings will be played at which times and by which hands and what type of music will be produced.
And the music that is produced by the stringed instruments of our emotions can have incredible effects.
Incredibly positive effects and incredibly negative effects.
Sometimes the music produced from our emotions lead to storms. Storms which we cannot be certain of how long they will last, how soft or severe they may be, or what kind of damages that they leave once they have passed.
More on this in a moment.
Details matter to me, and I don’t know where I got that habit. It’s a useful skill but has its downsides, as you can imagine.
I need to ask a favor of you, Dear Reader, and I need you to take it seriously as you read this section: participate with me in a game of numbers as we voyage backwards through time.
We’re going back to March 22, 2015. It was a Sunday. I was a doctoral student at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I am in the writing stage of my dissertation. My subject of study are the films of Terrence Malick. I was living in student housing but had gone to the campus library as I worked better when I was surrounded by books and not the stacks of DVDs just waiting for the opportunity to be viewed.
One of the films I was analyzing Malick’s The Tree of Life. Released in 2011, it would win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year. I had seen the film twice in theaters at the Naro Cinema in Norfolk, Virginia. The first time was with Paul Politi. When the film had ended, Paul and I both sat in stunned silence and Paul said to me, with tears in his eyes, “you have to do something with what we just saw…” The second time I saw the film I took my professor, Dr. Fraser, with me and sitting in stunned silence, once again after the film had concluded, Dr. Fraser said to me “I can see why you want to write your dissertation on this guy…” At the time of this writing that was thirteen years and almost five months ago.
There is a scene in The Tree of Life where Malick takes the viewer on a voyage through time, starting at the creation of the universe and moving forward. During the time of the dinosaurs Malick chooses to linger on a scene in which a predator interacts with an injured herbivore lying in a stream.
Richard Chew, an editor who has worked on many of Malick’s films, told an interviewer that this scene was the thesis of the film: the duality within ourselves to choose the way of nature or the way of grace.
Screen shot for reference:
The significance of the two dinosaurs interacting echoes throughout the voyage of time that Malick takes through the film’s narrative. The main character in the film’s narrative voyages backwards through time to when he and his brothers were children learning the way of nature and grace in the suburbs of Waco, Texas in the 1950’s.
Another consequence of watching The Tree of Life twice, both times at the Naro Cinema in Norfolk, were the scenes of the main character’s childhood allowed me to voyage backwards through time to my own childhood growing up in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado in the mid-to-late 1980’s to the early 1990’s.
Watching the film again, in March of 2015, played the stringed instrument of my emotions and brought back the storm that flooded my heart and mind 4 years prior. I was voyaging backwards through time once again.
A series of memories that emerged in particular clarity was of a certain period in sixth grade. Sixth grade, in Jefferson County, Colorado at that time, was the final stage of elementary education. There were four sections of sixth graders. I was enrolled in Mrs. Leonard’s section, and I had a mad crush on a fellow sixth grader who was enrolled in Mrs. Auger’s section. The sixth graders were housed in temporary buildings. I was in temporary building one and [redacted] was in temporary building four.
As sixth graders we would go to the other temporary buildings for other classes, and during one visit to Mrs. Auger’s temporary building number four, I happened to sit at [redacted]’s desk and I stole a note that she and a friend of hers named Amy had been sharing. I thought her handwriting was magical.
I should have left a replacement note, something like this:
And here’s the letdown: I returned the note I stole a few days later and I never told [redacted] and as far as I know she never knew I had been the one who stole it.
There was a brief moment, towards the end of school year, that [redacted] and I were standing near one another at the bike racks for students who rode their bikes to school, and I could have said something to her, should have something to her, would have said something to her, but I lacked the courage.
When sixth grade had concluded [redacted] and I went to different schools and while [redacted] lived in a nearby neighborhood, I did not have the courage to act upon whatever I was feeling at the time. I could have gone and talked to her, but I chose not to.
All of this happened 31 years ago, at the time of this writing. I was 12 years old and incredibly optimistic.
18 years later I would be sitting in the Naro Cinema, with Dr. Fraser, for the second screening of The Tree of Life which allowed me to voyage backwards through time to the year 1992 in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado.
In one month and one year (March of 2025), ten years will have passed since I composed and mailed the letter to [redacted] which is the heart of this piece.
I suppose the real question is this: 9 years and almost two months have passed, at the time of this writing, since March of 2015, and what has changed? Did the letter make a dent in the universe or radically alter the course my life has taken?
Let’s answer that question, but before we continue, allow me a brief adjunct into a fictional “what if…”
It’s 1992 and I am 12 years old. I will graduate from the sixth grade and matriculate into a local junior high school in the Jefferson County School District of Littleton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, Colorado. My Dad declines the promotion to turn things around at the Great Lakes Division and my family and I remain in Colorado.
[redacted] and I live in the same neighborhood, so I will see her occasionally as she goes to another school, in a different part of the city than I do, but we know the same people, and frequent many of the same social hubs, so you know how it goes.
At some point in the future of this “what if…”, a future that cannot be fully visualized, perhaps after graduating from high school and starting college, I will reach out to [redacted] over the early web 2.0 channels of online communication and tell [redacted] that I have liked her since sixth grade and had only recently summoned the courage to tell her so.
[redacted]’s response is not at all what I expected and for the moment I can only sit in amazement. I never would have thought…
It is at this point that we leave this fictional narrative as my pessimism prevents me from imagining it further.
What if it had happened?
What if, indeed.
Because I am not one to disappoint, this brings us to the catharsis that occurred 3 years and some months after the first and second voyages through time at the first and second screening of The Tree of Life and the third voyage backwards through time in 2015 in which I composed and mailed a letter to [redacted], 18 years after we graduated sixth grade in 1992, two years and some months after we briefly saw one another in-person at a place that I would have never expected.
I told you this would be a game of numbers.
Dear Reader, my thanks to you for your patience and participation in this exercise of a game with numbers and a voyage through time.
It’s about time I offered some sort of payoff your investment in reading this.
The following letter was composed and mailed on March 22, 2015, from the Virginia Beach Post Office, Kempsville Station.
Because I love details, I saved the letter to my computer and present a screenshot of it below.
Some textual changes have been made, but the text is 99.9% as it was when it was composed and mail. The names of [redacted] have been removed for privacy reasons.
March 22, 2015
[redacted],
Are you ready for a true blast from the past?
Here it is: you and I attended the same elementary school for sixth grade. I was in Mrs. Leonard’s class, and I envied you because you had Mrs. Auger. Mrs. Auger had been my third-grade teacher at Ute Meadows and had I known she was going to be teaching sixth grade I would have protested to be in her class.
However, I don’t think you and I ever officially knew one another. I did learn your name through Alan Goncalves who knew who you were, and he told me what your name was.
Do you remember when all of the classes made paper balloons with rubber cement, and we had a balloon festival? I was going to try to talk to you that day, but the balloon festival ruined everything. And to top it off my balloon didn’t go very far.
Here’s another one of those unbelievable intersections that make no sense, but yet it really happened: I was standing in line for the Raptor roller coaster Cedar Point in Ohio (summer 1994?) and you were about 20 feet ahead of me in the long, long line. I was with my cousins and my parents, and I was way too embarrassed to say anything to you because I was with my cousins and of course my parents always embarrassed me at that age. It had been almost three years since sixth grade, and I had moved away from Denver so I had convinced myself that you wouldn’t remember who I was.
So why am I writing this letter? Allow me to provide a proper context.
I’m a doctoral student at a university in Virginia and I am knee deep in writing my dissertation. I love cinema and I love film and I knew that if I had to write a dissertation, I would choose a topic I could live with. I chose the films of Terrence Malick. If you have seen a film by Malick then you’ll understand why I couldn’t resist.
One of the films that I am right in the middle of analyzing is The Tree of Life. It was released in theaters in 2011. Did you happen to see it?
Towards the end of the film there is a 20-minute sequence in which Malick takes the audience through the creation of the world and through early forms of life, dinosaurs and eventually back to the present day.
During one of my repeat screenings of this film my brain was flooded with emotions, and I started thinking about when I was a kid in Littleton and I don’t know why I thought of being a kid in Littleton but I did and all these memories of sixth grade and Outdoor Lab and the balloon flight festival and other events that I haven’t thought of in years just overwhelmed me.
I don’t know why this happened, but it did and dealing with the emotional impact has been challenging. How exactly does one go about finding catharsis over things that happened more than twenty years ago?
All because of a scene in a movie.
So why did I write this letter?
You will have to accept my apology as I have no real explanation. And I have tried to think of a rational reason as to what motivated me to write to you. My rational mind wants to explain it away as an aftereffect of watching an emotionally abstract movie by a complicated filmmaker. That’s what I get for picking the films of Terrence Malick as a dissertation topic.
But I don’t agree with that conclusion, so I am going to dismiss it. Let me introduce myself.
My name is Andrew Rosbury. I moved with my family to Littleton when I was 2 years old. I am an only child. Alan Goncalves was a friend of mine in elementary school. I still talk to him occasionally. Mrs. Auger was my third-grade teacher at Ute Meadows. After third grade I moved to Bradford. I used to ride my bike to school. I wore the same jeans for the entire week of Outdoor Lab. That made my mom mad. My family moved to Ohio right before I started 8th grade. The next summer was when I saw you at Cedar Point and I didn’t say hi. I still have family in Colorado. Last summer I had a cousin lose a long battle with cancer. I attended her memorial service in Longmont. That was one of the most difficult things I have had to do.
Here’s another unbelievable anecdote: [redacted] (do you remember her?) and I were in the same third-grade class with Mrs. Auger. She lived in the same neighborhood as I did, in fact, a few streets over. I was in Austin, Texas for a brief vacation in 2008 and Lauren randomly approached me at Mozart’s Coffee because I was reading a book by Richard Adams (Shardik) that she had read as a kid, and we started talking. The look on her face when she finally realized who I was and how we knew one another…the look on her face was priceless.
I am sorry it has taken me this long to introduce myself. It was a privilege and an honor to have been a sixth-grade student with you. You got to ride the Raptor before I did. That was my one and only trip to Cedar Point. And I will always be envious that you had Mrs. Auger as a sixth-grade teacher. You still live in Colorado and while I moved away years ago, I have recurring dreams that I am once again living in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.
So why did I write this letter?
One of my priorities in life is to never fear the unknown.
Or leave things unknown.
I had no idea that a scene in a movie would lead to all of this.
And I’m not sorry that it did.
If there is a catharsis to be had it comes as a fulfillment to a class I took on the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard reasoned that when a person commits to being pure of heart, they will have the ability to see to how to do the most good in the world around them.
Writing this letter is an investment of good into the world.
Even if it takes a while.
Glad you finally got to meet me,
Andrew F. Rosbury, ABD
Virginia Beach, Virginia/Plano, Texas
Emotions are stringed instruments within our souls. It’s impossible to tell which strings will be played at what times and which types of music will be produced, or what the effects of that music will be.
Sometimes the music played on these instruments can cause extreme weather conditions and the damage that occurs from those storms takes a long time to repair. Dents will surely remain.
After composing and mailing the letter to [redacted] on March 22, 2015, I moved from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Dallas, Texas where I would live, work, and do great things until the Long Goodbye.
So, what happened to [redacted] and did I ever receive a response?
I will default to a writer who is superior to me to answer that question:
“Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic.” Young-ha Kim, I Have The Right To Destroy Myself
It has been cathartic to revisit the letter I composed and mailed on March 22, 2015, and to engage in a game of numbers and voyage through time once again. It has helped calm a storm within me, the details of which I do not wish to disclose.
This post is a return to creative writing after a longer than desired period of creative silence.
Dear Reader, I would not fault you if you are still wondering if I could actually voyage backwards in time and change events, would I?
If I could make the “what if…” actually happen, would I?
I don’t know if I have an answer to that question. It’s amusing to think about, but my control over how the universe plays out is extremely limited. I find comfort in knowing that some options are not available to me and never were. Knowing this does not lessen the damage from the storm of emotions or make it hurt less, but it also prevents me from sailing madly into a hurricane thinking I can change things through the power of my will.
Pascal Mercier, another superior author, wrote in Night Train to Lisbon, “A feeling is no longer the same when it comes the second time. It dies through the awareness of its return. We become tired and weary of our feelings when they come too often and last too long.”
In revisiting myself in a letter I composed and mailed to [redacted] on March 22, 2015, I find comfort in the words I chose to share with someone else, not knowing what kind of effect they would have.
I mused in a previous piece that ideas (and words) are organic, living things. They require care and thought and attention. And once fully grown they are beautiful to behold. The words and ideas I chose for the letter written on March 22, 2015 were an investment of good in the world. I can see it more clearly looking backwards, although I probably did not guess that what I was writing then would voyage through time and be meaningful to me in the future.
This is not the first time that something I wrote in the past became profoundly meaningful at a later point in time.
12 years earlier from the March 15th, 2015, date, I must have briefly seen the future as I wrote the following words at my favorite writing spot (Stonebriar Center, Frisco, Texas) in an attempt at a poem I titled As A Poet (presented in selected pieces):
As a poet I’ve witnessed broken hearts.
Mine was the most fragile.
It shattered like glass and the
sound echoed down the corridors of my soul.
As a poet I’ve seen my soul.
It occurred only once, and I changed that day.
I want it to happen again because I hear
music now.
As a poet,
I write my life one letter at a time,
the ink flows as blood and the paper becomes
skin and bone.
Death will stop my hands, but my words will live forever.
October 10th, 2003 (Revised, July, 2008, Mozart’s Coffee House, Austin, Texas)
Reviewing the words committed to paper and then to the computer, it seems that at the time of writing As A Poet, I was speaking to my future self, as if I knew that my future self would periodically voyage backwards through time to speak to my past self.
How did I know this? I don’t think I did, but then again, maybe the familiarity of voyaging through time is such that I no longer notice when it happens.
Words are organic, living things. With care and consideration, they have the capability to transcend time.
My letter to [redacted] was and is an investment of good into the world, however small, and I may never know what good it did or or what other letters I have sent have done and I will have to be satisfied with that.
Before we leave [redacted] and the letter that I wrote to her, I will say the following: I make it a point to pray for [redacted] and I will continue to do so. God Most High knows what to do with those prayers.
I may not see the dividends of that investment of prayer, but after my voyage through time has concluded, I’ll know.
And here, Dear Reader, is where I have nothing left to offer other than a final thought that will form the catharsis that this piece has become. This is something to carry with you as a small reminder to focus on the good.
Sometimes words need to be captured and committed to a distinct medium so as not to escape. Words are organic, living things. They require care and thought and attention and if handled carefully and correctly, they have the possibility to create wonderful music on the stringed instruments in our souls.
Use the words we have available to make small investments of good into the world. Small investments of good that only cost the price of a postage stamp or brief amount of air in our lungs or the time it takes to hit send.
Death will stop my hands, but my words, small investments of good into the world, will go on living forever.
Final numbers: the first draft of this piece was committed to computer on Friday, February 16th between 10:00 am and 3:00 pm. Final revisions were made on Sunday, February 18th from 2:00 pm to 3:30 pm.
Andrew F. Rosbury 
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