I never thought I’d have a “favorite album.” Music was just… there. Background noise.

Until it wasn’t.

It started on those train rides. Off-peak hours.

Just me, sprawled across a three-seater.

Alone, but not lonely. I’d slip on my headphones, crank up Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and crack open my introductory quantum mechanics textbook.

For a couple of years, this was my routine. A student of sound and science, fumbling through both.

Time got funny on those rides. The world outside blurred. It was just me, Bach, and a swirling sea of equations I barely understood. But somehow, it all started to make a weird kind of sense.

Now, when those notes hit my ears, I’m transported.

Back to those train rides.

Back to that heady mix of music and mind-bending physics concepts.

My thoughts drift to half-remembered ideas of superposition and entanglement, all set to a Baroque soundtrack.

Those train rides ended years ago, but they left an indelible mark.

Above the piano in the corner of my living room hangs a framed sheet of Bach’s Prelude in C minor. It’s a reminder of where it all began.

You see, those commutes, filled with Bach and quantum musings, sparked something unexpected. A desire to create that music myself. To feel those notes under my fingers, to understand them from the inside out.

So I started learning. Me, an adult with no musical background, sitting down at a keyboard, fumbling through scales and arpeggios. It wasn’t easy. There were days I wanted to quit, when my fingers felt like lead and the music like an unsolvable equation.

But I persisted. Just like I had with those quantum physics textbooks. Slowly, painfully slowly, the notes began to make sense. My fingers found their way. The music started to flow.

Now, years later, I can play that Prelude. Not perfectly, not like Glenn Gould or Angela Hewitt. But I can play it. And when I do, I’m transported again. Back to those train rides, back to that feeling of touching something vast and beautiful and just beyond my understanding.