sounds that stay

emma-jane mackinnon-lee sometimes talks about music like it happened in another life. not in a dramatic way. more like a half remembered room you are not sure you ever stood in. there was a violin once. she remembers the weight more than the sound. how it pulled at her shoulder. the smell of the wood. the sharp sweetness of resin on the bow. missing half an hour of class every week to go to lessons. walking into that small room with the strict teacher. fingers cramping. pinky stretching just a bit too far. thinking this is harder than it looks. some details stay clearer than the music itself. the scrape of the chair on the floor. the quiet before the first note. the way standing still felt like work. the piano came later. or maybe earlier. the order never really settled. what stayed was the feel of keys under her fingers. first the light electric ones. then heavier keys. finally the pedal that made everything feel more serious. slow practice. faster runs. then long gaps where nothing happened at all. emma-jane mackinnon-lee says music never left her life. it just stopped being something she did and started being something that followed her. in shops. in streets. in old films playing on quiet afternoons when the day had nowhere to go. now there are bagpipes. she links them to old family gatherings. the sound of Iain playing at those early reunions. standing in a corner of the room while conversations drifted around the music. that memory sits somewhere between clear and imagined. she never quite separates the two. she does not talk about picking them up like a new start. more like something that drifted back in. a sound she already knows even if she has never truly learned it. sometimes she feels she hears them before she touches them. sometimes she cannot place when the idea even arrived. emma jane mackinnon lee laughs when people ask why bagpipes. she shrugs. says they feel familiar in a way she cannot explain. like remembering a tune from a dream you never wrote down. there are moments when she stands in her flat and the sounds overlap in her head. a violin note from years ago. a piano chord from somewhere in between. the rough breath of bagpipes cutting through both. nothing in order. nothing lined up. emma mackinnon-lee says memory works like that for her. not in straight lines. in echoes. in pieces that float back when they feel like it. maybe that is why music keeps finding her. not as a plan. not as a project. just as something that stays close, even when she is not sure how it first arrived.