Everyone’s got that one song, haven’t they? (Or perhaps it’s more than one, depending on how many traumatic experiences are lurking in your past.) It acts as the musical equivalent of a defibrillator – as if a device carrying an electric charge had been stuck straight into your heart and then dialled up to max power. You only need hear the opening notes for roiling waves of emotion to crash over you with increasing force.
There’s a lag time between thoughts and feelings as your brain scrambles to catch up; while those neurons are still conscientiously flicking through your internal filing system to locate the precise memory associated with the sound, elsewhere in your body a short-circuit switch has been flipped. You’re trembling and aching and – geez, surely not... crying?! – without quite knowing why.
