She still listened to Bach, Schubert, the clean geometry of sound she had lived inside for years. But something else started pushing in. Music with fewer rules and more nerve. Guitars that repeated instead of developed. At first she treated it like a side interest. You don\u2019t abandon classical music, you expand. But the change wasn\u2019t expansion. It was realignment. The old music began to feel like a well-governed state, built on centuries of consensus. But the new music felt like a street protest that had turned into a city. Impossible to regulate, and full of a kind of life needing no permission. She started going to shows. People stood too close together. The music didn\u2019t resolve so much as insist. No one waited for silence to approve them. Her friends noticed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou\u2019re into this now?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou used to have such refined taste.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Refined. Like she had once been proper and now was slipping into disorder. She tried to explain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not that I\u2019ve stopped hearing what I used to love. It\u2019s that I\u2019m hearing something else more clearly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They nodded, the kind of nod that closes a conversation. Dinners became awkward. Conversations felt like they were taking place across a border that hadn\u2019t been there before. One friend said it plainly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t understand why you\u2019d leave something so developed for something so\u2026 primitive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Primitive. As if directness were a failure of evolution. She didn\u2019t argue. The truth was harder to package. The new music felt less mediated. It didn\u2019t ask her to interpret it. It asked her to be present. And she was. The friendships thinned the way coalitions do when a government shifts direction. One person stops showing up. Another hesitates. Eventually you look around and the room has changed. She found new people. Not better. Just aligned differently. They didn\u2019t ask her to justify anything. They were already standing in the same noise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One night, she put on Bach again. It was still perfect. Nothing had been lost. The structure held. The intelligence was intact. It hadn\u2019t diminished. But it no longer felt like the center. She turned it off and put on a record that repeated the same chord until it became something else. It felt closer. She didn\u2019t regret the change. But she understood something she hadn\u2019t before. Taste isn\u2019t just preference and when that shifts, everything around you either follows, or stays behind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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