Something happens in the summer. I don't know what to call it.
Something sleek and spineless and dangerous, something very dangerous. It crawls out of muscle memory like clockwork. I don't know what it is. I don't even know if it's good or bad, but it's bright and slow and foggy and every memory of it disappears as soon as it leaves.
The roof was dripping into a trashcan in the middle of the floor. The music store was dark and quiet, the ceiling covered with hanging half-translucent plastic sheets where cloudlight shone onto the dark green carpet. Barely anyone was there.
I sat on a speaker beside the guitar counter, where a man I almost recognized re-stringed the resonator I brought in after trying to do it myself and breaking a string, along with a good section of mental and emotional denial and blockage.
My lungs felt new and tired, like the streets after rain, and I realized the music store held the calm protection of a nursery. A nervous-looking old man thumbed through records. Someone somewhere tuned a piano. A mother and young girl opened the door where the light fell softly on the carpets, and their footsteps made no sound. The water from the plastic sheets dripped and dripped and dripped, and I wondered how heavy the trashcan was.
"So you play the cello, huh?" the man asked hesitantly, remembering what I had told him some minutes before and making an effort at quiet friendliness.
"Yeah, yeah," I said.
"Since you were real young, or...?"
"Since I was eight." He spun the stringwinder around the peg and looked up at me briefly. "My grandpa taught me," I added.
Within this conversation we had both gratefully concluded neither of us wanted to talk, and so we happily continued in silence. He worked, and I watched, and learned through watching.
In that dimly-lit damp empty music store, time had slowed and settled, and the world wrapped around it in a tumultuous echo of struggle and chaos.
From where I sat on the top of a speaker, tapping the soles of my shoes on the carpet, I was a child. Everyone was. Frowning in their sleep, twitching their toes, breath catching inwardly every few minutes from all the crying it took to fall asleep.
The man behind the counter would not hurt me, nor would I hurt him, and I watched his face carefully as if in awe of this fact. He fine-tuned the last string and picked up the instrument and rested it on his knee, and I watched as he played something blues-y and beautiful and the both of us enjoyed it and I paid him in exact change and thanked him and he wished me a good day and I wished him likewise. And I walked back out into the soft sunlight, where cars rushed into brightness and brightness rushed into sound and the asphalt all around sucked up the sky where brightness sang.
Something sleek and spineless and dangerous, something very dangerous. It crawls out of muscle memory like clockwork. I don't know what it is. I don't even know if it's good or bad, but it's bright and slow and foggy and every memory of it disappears as soon as it leaves.
The roof was dripping into a trashcan in the middle of the floor. The music store was dark and quiet, the ceiling covered with hanging half-translucent plastic sheets where cloudlight shone onto the dark green carpet. Barely anyone was there.
I sat on a speaker beside the guitar counter, where a man I almost recognized re-stringed the resonator I brought in after trying to do it myself and breaking a string, along with a good section of mental and emotional denial and blockage.
My lungs felt new and tired, like the streets after rain, and I realized the music store held the calm protection of a nursery. A nervous-looking old man thumbed through records. Someone somewhere tuned a piano. A mother and young girl opened the door where the light fell softly on the carpets, and their footsteps made no sound. The water from the plastic sheets dripped and dripped and dripped, and I wondered how heavy the trashcan was.
"So you play the cello, huh?" the man asked hesitantly, remembering what I had told him some minutes before and making an effort at quiet friendliness.
"Yeah, yeah," I said.
"Since you were real young, or...?"
"Since I was eight." He spun the stringwinder around the peg and looked up at me briefly. "My grandpa taught me," I added.
Within this conversation we had both gratefully concluded neither of us wanted to talk, and so we happily continued in silence. He worked, and I watched, and learned through watching.
In that dimly-lit damp empty music store, time had slowed and settled, and the world wrapped around it in a tumultuous echo of struggle and chaos.
From where I sat on the top of a speaker, tapping the soles of my shoes on the carpet, I was a child. Everyone was. Frowning in their sleep, twitching their toes, breath catching inwardly every few minutes from all the crying it took to fall asleep.
The man behind the counter would not hurt me, nor would I hurt him, and I watched his face carefully as if in awe of this fact. He fine-tuned the last string and picked up the instrument and rested it on his knee, and I watched as he played something blues-y and beautiful and the both of us enjoyed it and I paid him in exact change and thanked him and he wished me a good day and I wished him likewise. And I walked back out into the soft sunlight, where cars rushed into brightness and brightness rushed into sound and the asphalt all around sucked up the sky where brightness sang.
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