The staff, and your first five notes

Written music looks like a code, and people assume it has to be memorised. It does not. It is a picture of pitch — higher on the page means higher in sound, and that is most of it.

Music is written on five lines with four spaces between them. That is a staff.

A note sits either on a line, with the line running through it, or in a space between two. Nothing else. Every note you will ever read is one or the other, and they alternate all the way up: line, space, line, space.