I was four years old. Young enough to still be wearing little socks with rubber grip bottoms, but old enough to recognize when something important was happening. I remember the carpet. I remember the stereo.
It was a towering Technics rack system—chrome faceplates, softly glowing LEDs, backlit EQ sliders like a sci-fi control panel. Below it, twin 3-foot-tall, 3-way speakers sat like monuments, each boasting a 200-watt capacity that far exceeded anything reasonable for a suburban living room. But this wasn’t about reason. It was about revelation.
I was playing nearby when the DJ’s voice broke through the FM static: “...and here it is, the brand-new one from Phil Collins...” My ears perked up. The intro began—slow, haunted, full of negative space and foreboding.
I ran to the stereo. It was already loud, but I knew what had to be done. I grabbed the big volume knob and cranked it, probably to something like 80% of full blast—well into the zone where adults would normally intervene. But no one stopped me. The song filled the house like a rising tide.
Then, I did something ceremonial: I opened the French doors that led onto the back deck and stepped outside, leaving the song behind me but not apart from me. It followed—reverberating through the air, refracting off glass and siding. I walked forward slowly, barefoot, the night wind brushing my hair.
The deck was high. From it, I could see the entire city lit up below like a motherboard. Streetlights glowed orange, the highway crawled with headlights. And across the way, level with my eyes, stood the ridge. On it, a red blinking tower—a sentinel. That was where the radio transmission came from. That was where the song had been born.
And in that moment, as the beat built and Phil Collins whispered from behind me, as those towers blinked in rhythm and the city pulsed below, something profound and unshakable happened inside me.
I looked out into the vast night and said, silently but with total conviction: “I am this.”