I was 13-years old, drifting off to sleep to radio the first time I heard Worlds Away by Strange Advance.

That opening slow drone interspersed with spacy dripping notes on the synthesizer awakened a feeling in me of something vast, infinite and immense: a feeling that there might be more than here and now.

At the time, I was in the throughs of adolescent angst navigating the cruel world of 13-year old girls. My biggest worry was that I was ugly and no one would ever love me. My biggest fear was that the middle-school bullies would smell my insecurities and make me the school pariah, the way they had another unfortunate girl in my class.  

I was a mess as only teenage girls can be but this song took me out of that and sent me somewhere else entirely.

That expansive feeling was my life, the road ahead.  But I didn’t know that yet.  

I didn’t know that until this week.

Songs imprint on us and capture moments.

Whenever I hear In the City by the Eagles, I’m transported back to summer of 1990, walking down Ogilvy Road in Ottawa towards my shift at the A&A Records at St. Laurent Shopping Centre, the sun beating off the pavement, and everything feeling so right.

Silversun Pickups’ Lazy Eye always brings me back to a stress-releasing run alongside the Bow River in Calgary the week I performed a Fringe show there in 2008.

Rappers Delight by the Sugarhill Gang is forever associated with feeling cool AF, two-stepping around the local roller rink when I was 12 (long before the term cool AF was invented).

But music also allows us to defy time, if only for a moment. 

My grandfather played banjo for most of his life. I last saw him when he was 92 years old.

His face was weathered and wrinkled and he was slow to move; but, when he took out that banjo, his fingers flew effortlessly across the strings and years dissolved from his face, transforming him into a young man in his 30s.

As my grandfather played, I could literally see, not my grandfather but Morely Giffin, the musician who toured the west coast with his country band in the 1950s and 60s.

And sometimes music comes full circle to connect to moments.

Earlier this week, Worlds Away came on the  just as radio as I was shutting down my work laptop for the day.

It stopped me in my tracks.

Instantly, I was brought back to the version of me 40 years earlier hearing it for the first time in bed.                                                                                            

And it floored me because this time, I wasn’t just me returning to the past, it was 13-year old me seeing her future: a future where insecurities came and went and grade-school bullies were just a blip.

As Darryl Kromm’s baritone voice kicked in, images flashed in my mind of the love, the laughter, the connections, the places I would go, the things I would create, the people I would meet, the relationships developed, the moments of pain and the moment of joy.

Me at 13 met me at 54. A portal that had opened that night in 1983 was closed: a loop had been completed.

What was once worlds away was now the worlds I’d stepped into.

We might not be able to change the things that have happened. But we can change the context and meaning we give those things.

The future can reach into the past and let that person know they’re not alone.

Sometimes, all it takes is a song.