It’s not a particularly sad piece of music; it’s in a major key, and more peaceful and majestic in nature than elegiac. When I heard it tonight, though, at the end of a crime drama, played by a sweet-faced boy in a white shirt and tie, I found that tears were streaming behind my glasses and coursing down the pillows of my cheeks. It still had that power over me, the first movement of Bach’s first cello suite, the power to still the world around me and smooth and release some tangled knot of sorrow hiding beneath the quotidian business of living.

I heard it for the first time when I was in the sixth grade, in Strings class. I had been playing the cello for a year in a desultory kind of way; playing a string instrument was a thing one did if one was the child of academics in a college town, in a school with a world famous music program. A man came into the orchestra room, tall, slender, possessed of a mop of dark curly hair and what I suppose are properly labeled “bedroom eyes.” He took his cello from its fiberglass case, pulled the steel endpin from its curved bottom, and rosined his bow. He sat, as I had been taught to sit, on the edge of his straight-backed chair. He smiled at us, and told us that his name was Peter, and that he was going to play us “a little Bach.” He leaned his head back, then, closed his eyes, raised his right arm and sighed; when his arm came down and the horsehair met the open “G” string, I was lost, found, and transfixed. Somewhere in the adolescent murk of hormones, half-formed desires and partial understandings, I knew that I wanted to do what he was doing, to be what he was, maybe to be him. Later that day, still haunted as if by a lucid dream, I asked my mother if I could have a recording of that music for my own. It sits, that record, to the right of me on a shelf as I write these words.

Years later, when I was in high school, my grandmother died in the guest room of our house. Once it was over, the ambulance gone, the family sorting out the shock and white noise that comes with loss, I carried my cello into the basement along with a straight-backed kitchen chair. I sat in the cold, damp cellar playing the first movement of Bach’s first suite over and over, swaying gently, crying without sound, my instrument an extension of my confused and incoherent soul. I had no words, not that words would have made any difference, but I had a way to keep myself tethered to the things of earth. I played, I wept, and the sweet, solid sanctity of Bach gave me peace that I could not otherwise have found.

It is what I always play first when I take out my instrument, not as often now that I am not properly “a musician” anymore, but a “person who used to be a musician.” My fingers still know their places, and there is nothing too technically difficult that my uncalloused, unpracticed fingers cannot find their way. It is harmony in a world of dissonance, proof of the divine, the spare, sacred bones of all of the world’s goodness. As I listened tonight, my left hand moved before I felt it, in those old familiar patterns, the call so subtle raising something so deep in me that there was no consciousness. He was playing my song, plain and simple, the music that gave me a passion, a voice, and a road between past and future.