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CS/
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Student @ Wellesley College & MIT 
 

02/05/25

Between the Bar Lines




Accompanying Soundtrack: Between the Bars by Elliott Smith

We talked about anticipation in my piano lesson today. Doug mentioned that sometimes, measure bars can be misleading: notes spill over, stretching across bars so that what feels like the beat “one" is actually the “four”, and what seems like the beginning is already part of something that started before.

Suddenly, the notes on the score looked like people. Tiny heads, round bellies, leaning into the next moment before it fully arrives.

It made me think: we don’t truly meet people at one fixed point in time. The connections overlap, anticipate forward and suspend backward, take root before we even realize. There’s no single second, no exact minute, no definitive hour that marks the beginning of knowing someone. It’s funny, too, because bar lines themselves are measures of time.

You don’t meet someone the moment you face them and exchange words. Maybe you first met them in a crowded street a year ago, unknowingly brushing past. Maybe you met them in the scribbled graffiti on a bathroom stall. Maybe you met them in stillness when you watched them play piano in an airport, minutes before you ever knew their name.

A melody isn’t confined to the measure it starts in. My ears met you before my eyes met yours.