The Musician

The things we consider real are, in my opinion, extremely fluid. Even your own mind doesn’t know if what you’re experiencing is “real” or a dream. Are you actually reading this? Or are you wrapped in silk sheets while images of pages and words flit underneath your eyelids? Am I writing this, or am I laying in a field of budding flowers and wild grasses, unconscious and vulnerable to whatever may prey on me? Our lives are full of these questions, to which there may never be an answer. At least until we wake up.

Nevertheless, if you would like to read about what I believe to be true, feel free. The words will be here, whether you finish this story or not.

One of the truths of my life is the Musician. Of the mysteries of the universe, they are just one. Obviously, I cannot untangle the web that is their life completely. I am not them. But hopefully, by the end of this story, you’ll have a synopsis of my discoveries.

You may also be asking who I am, and my relevance to the story. To that, my most cherished audience, I say: What is a good story without a narrator, and what is a narrator without a story to tell?

The answer to both parts of this question is nothing. If you choose to entangle yourself in this story, you subsequently make me real. So, if I wish to keep my place in this grey and ashen world, might I at least attempt to brighten it, just a bit, if only for you, the reader?

My first encounter with the Musician, though I didn’t know it at the time, was at my birth. My mother, consumed by the rather difficult task at hand, didn’t notice them. Neither did the doctors or nurses, who were far too occupied as you can imagine. My father might have noticed them, if he’d been paying enough attention, but I wouldn’t blame him for missing the Musician on account of all the chaos. I didn’t even notice it at first.

When things settled down and my mother cradled me against her chest, I finally stopped crying, as one would expect a newborn to. Though it wasn’t the warmth of my mother’s arms, or the smooth motion of her rocking me back and forth that ceased my tears. It was a melody, wafting about the room. The notes swelled and blossomed. Dissonance overtook the tune, the tempo became lethargic. The discomfort was resolved. Some parts were frantic and beautifully discombobulated. Some were sweet and full. When the musician released the final note, I saw them leave in a flurry of shadow.

I didn’t see the Musician for a long while after that, but I thought about them every day. The song seemed to be engraved into my memory, and I found myself recounting the rhythms often. It didn’t seem to matter that I had only heard it once, and that I was mere minutes into my life.

No one else, not my parents or friends, seemed to encounter the same thing.

When I was twelve, my mother, father, and I received rather concerning news. We were asked to attend a wedding. Now, don’t think I have anything against weddings. They can be quite wonderful. Colors and people and dancing and food and drink and celebration could never be bad (right?). The problem lied in the wedding pair. The ceremony was to take place between my cousin and her then-fiance. Let’s just say, they weren’t the most reliable couple. Many times my aunt received late night, angry phone calls from my cousin about her beloved. Many more times she had to make up a bed on the couch for her daughter to spend the night, weekend, or sometimes week.

I guess the fact that they always ended back up together could be taken as a good sign, a testament to their commitment. My cousin thought so. Everyone else did not. But my aunt was determined to be supportive, and urged my parents to be as well. I was dragged along with them.

This would be the second time I saw the Musician.

When the sweet singing of the song began, I immediately recognized them. I listened, and tuned out the rest of the ceremony. They only played one song. They only ever played one song. While I listened to each note, I heard no instrument that I knew of. The sound was the Musician’s alone, as if it came from their being, not an instrument.

Note:

Do not confuse this with their voice. It is not. I do not think they have a voice, to be perfectly frank. Or they just have no one to talk to.

Even after twelve years I could distinguish their music from any other noise. No one around me seemed to notice.

The music, while still beautiful, had a dangerous edge to it this time. The swells and sweetness were gone, replaced by harsh articulations and accents. When the music cut off, I expected to see them leave in the black smoke that I saw when I was a baby. The sight didn’t come, at least not yet. This seemed to only be an interlude. When the song began again, the notes cried and carried. The melody sat in the air like a heavy fog. Soon enough, the tempo rushed and rushed and spilled over in irate madness. The last note hung unresolved in the morning sun, filtered by the leaves of the trees, fed by the spring breeze.

It was after this encounter that I came to the conclusion I was only one of a few, if any, people who could hear the Musician. How could no one else show concern for the unlikely wedding sonata?

Once again, the Musician disappeared into their world, which seemed completely separate from our own, for a few years, though the next time I saw them, it was sooner than I expected.

When I was fifteen, I became ill. I could hardly wake up and move and I felt as if I were being dragged across the road of my life by the ankle. This pattern continued for almost three years, and my parents could never figure the problem. Eventually, I regained my liveliness and my family thanked God that they could keep my sickness in the past. I doubted God had anything to do with it.

It was after this spell of my suffering wellbeing that I began to piece together my truth. I recalled the song that was played at my birth. My song, I began to think of it as. It was not simply background music to my mother’s cries and mine. No, of course the Musician was of more importance. The Musician’s work was a road map.

With my newfound revelation, I began to wonder. I tried to interpret the song, decode what it meant for my life. With every person I met, I wondered what their song sounded like, if they had a song. Was it full of sorrow and pain, or did it dance and weave through the air into their ears?

While I was walking through town the summer before my second year of college, a girl a year older than me fell into step beside me. She had thick black hair that seemed almost blue when the sun hit it, and eyes the color of a rose’s leaves. It was because of those eyes that I didn’t hear the first few words she said. I assume those words were some sort of greeting, but I can never be sure. I was transfixed, wondering how Nature could miss that they put two stones of peridot instead of eyes in her head.

Every day since that one, for the rest of the summer, we would walk around the town and talk. Her voice was a song of it’s own, one that rivaled even the Musician’s. All because of a chance meeting on the boiling roadside.

When I reminisce, and not very often I do, I think of that day. And when I do, I shudder. I curse myself for not listening. See, that very first day, I heard the Musician, a faint buzzing in my head. I didn’t see them anywhere, but I heard them. And maybe, if I hadn’t been so wrapped up in her lovely green eyes, I would have realized.

Music can and always will have differing interpretations.

A lot happened during that summer. My cousin, the one who got married, ran away and didn’t tell anyone where she went. Her and her husband’s marriage was full of fighting, contributed by both parties. Though, in the later years, the arguments seemed reduced to disdainful glares and indirect insults. They seemed indifferent then, like the fire of their love and hatred both had died out. Maybe running away was a bit childish, but it was certainly not out of character. She was the type of person that hated indifference, and I cannot say that I am much different myself.

If you’re going to do something, don’t do something that you have no emotional connection to. Fight and argue all you want, but make it about something you’re passionate about. No one can have an intriguing conversation if you have no investment in it.

Anyway. She couldn’t stand living with someone who wouldn’t even give her the time of day to hate her, so she left. We heard from her two months later, but she only said she was okay and not dead. She was not coming back.

And so, with a couple of packed bags and a train ticket to God-knows-where, her and her husband’s song ended without any form of closure.

I heard all these things over the telephone, as I was still at college. I stayed there all four years, and left only after I graduated, with the exception of holidays.

As the summer came to an end, and the cooling temperatures pulled the leaves from the trees, I became increasingly infatuated with the girl with the olivine eyes. The lack of green from the dying foliage was supplemented by her.

Or, rather, she soaked up the color and gained life from their sacrifices. Yes, it seemed as if with every passing day, despite the air growing rapidly colder, she grew warmer. She radiated the light that the sun refused to give up. I gained comfort in the steadiness and the stability of her attention, of her love.

One day, while we were walking, she looked so horribly normal. The light, while not choked out, had dimmed. Something was wrong, but I did not know what. I had asked her what was causing her grief, and for a split second her eyebrows narrowed over brewing pots of emeralds. It passed so quickly, though, that I wasn’t completely sure it had happened. I know now that it did.

She’d kept things from me, of course. I didn’t expect her to tell me everything, nor did she expect the same from me. I knew what she wanted me to know, and I was perfectly content with that.

Hastily, she gave one phony excuse or another, and the next time I saw her, whatever was coughing on the smoke of her dying flame had retreated.

After maybe three months of the growing cold, a week of snow and wind forced everyone indoors. She and I didn’t talk, instead waited for the storm to pass to see each other again.

During that storm, I had a copious amount of time. I picked through my textbooks, went over my work, but more often I found myself sitting, thinking. When my mind could no longer consume the text written on the pages, I let it wander. I thought of the song I heard when I first fell into step with the girl with the wild black hair and captivating smile. The one who would make any conversation a captivating one. It was a light and flitty piece, and I turned over the meaning in my head. As it smoothed and eroded under my thought, a bittersweet note emerged. Yes, it was happy, but it seemed to be the wrong kind of happiness. Like looking back at pictures of a passed loved one. The sweet memories left everything after tasting sour and tart.

Suddenly I couldn’t wait for the storm to pass. I knew in the back of my mind that there was nothing to be done about it. The Musician plucked notes out of the air and in doing so sealed the fate of our beginnings. But I didn't know what else to do. I wrapped myself up and trudged through the snow to her apartment.

After the year of the snowstorm, I left. I traded life in a college town for life in a bustling city in Britain, where I worked in a small bakery. My days started early and were filled with the scent of bread and sweets and the heat of ovens. The shop was small, and I had only a handful of coworkers, though we spoke so little it was as if I didn’t have any at all.

The work was repetitive, but I found comfort in the motions. For a few years, My life was confined to a small apartment, the small bakery and the roads that connected the two. But that was just another thing that gave me security.

One morning--it was early Autumn, if I remember correctly--I started my way to the bakery, walking the path that was practically carved into the cement from my shuffling steps. I had a hat covering my hair, and--yes, I recall Autumn, remember the dull oranges and yellows of the leaves just starting to turn--a gust of wind lifted it and carried it to a strangers’ feet. With the hat, the wind also carried music. A cacophony of sounds crescendoed as I approached the stranger to which my garment had found. Softly first, barely a whisper of a note as I took the first step. When I registered the sound my heart lurched into my throat and my feet stopped in their tracks. Icy fear flooded my veins, and I turned to run back to my apartment.

The once enchanting music had become haunted. I tried to reason that it could be evaluated, I could dissect the meaning and try to map the same road the Musician had. But what if it led to agony? What if the end of this beginning was pain?

Another question clawed its way through my mind--had the journey already begun? Was there any way to alter the outcome? Were our tapestries woven by the Musician only one panel of a quilt? I guess the most I could do was try to find out.

I opened my door and peered out. Down the street, the stranger was wandering with my hat in his hands, scanning the passing faces. He was old and frail, and walked with a heavier step on one side than the other. As I stepped onto the sidewalk, I heard the Musician again. The song was a continuation of the earlier one, hadn’t started again or started a new one.

I realized how odd of an encounter I must have been, but had he realized why I’d run, he’d get swept up too, I bet.

I turned on my heel to leave when the music stopped. It was bright and lively, but quiet. I tried to think what it meant, but I couldn’t. There were so many ways to interpret music, and I had no idea what to think.

I pushed open the door to her house. It had been left unlocked, and I knocked to no answer. At first everything seemed perfectly mundane. A coffee table with scattered books and cups stood in the living room, a few mugs knocked over. I called out to her, but heard nothing in return. Blankets and pillows littered the room’s floor, but she was never the tidiest person around. She was somewhat careless, when it came to nonessential things.

The more I looked the farther my stomach dropped. A picture frame was shattered, and the glass shimmered in the carpet. The broken edges were flecked with dried blood. A lamp was thrown from the side table. I stepped slowly through the mess. Out of fear of what I might find or genuine carefulness, I can’t say. Probably a bit of both, to be honest.

I heard the glass crunch under my boot and I turned into the kitchen. She was on the linoleum floor, and blood pooled under her. The deep crimson was in stark contrast with her white shirt. I dropped to my knees and folded under the weight of her corpse. I wanted to feel the rise and fall of her chest, or the beat of her heart, no matter how faint. Disbelief coursed through me but even more present was anger. I knew what I was going to find from the moment I left my building, but that didn’t stop the feral, guttural scream from escaping my lips.

I don’t know how long I was yelling, or how long it took someone to see what the commotion was, but by the time I was pulled from her, my throat was raw and my ears were ringing. As I was shepherded out of the room, I caught a last glimpse of her celadon eyes, drained of the life that lived in them every day I’d known her.

If there is one thing I do know about my reaction, it is that I know who I was screaming at. The Musician had scripted this fall, had woven the strings of her death. Why? Was there some greater good that her death achieved? Or did the black smoke that I was fascinated with in my youth house a sinister mind?

The Musician set into motion with the encounter in Britain the chain of me skipping from town to town. I rarely stayed in the same place for extended periods of time. My feet carried me away from the smoke of the Musician to the smoke of an unknown future.

For all the moving around, I kept my mind as occupied as my feet. I picked up a brush and some paints. I wasn’t very good, not at first. But I didn’t care. The smell of the paints filled my nose, the colors my eyes, and the strokes my head. I used all different mediums--oil, charcoal, clay. Something as insignificant as color or texture could be given such immense meaning in different patterns.

Seventeen years later, I woke one morning to quite the surprise. I was dead.

I have no understanding of how it happened, but I am glad I didn’t know of it until after. I had no close friends or family around, so it took a couple of weeks before someone found me. The landlord hadn’t received my payment for the month and came to check.

In the weeks between my death and my discovery, I realized I could still make art. In fact, it was one of the only things I could do. So I did. All day, I studied the colors streaming through my window, the texture of the fabrics around my house. I drew, and painted, and sculpted until my body was retrieved.

What a funny feeling, it is, being tied to a body but not living in it. I was pulled along with it, and when it was cremated, I was relieved to find I could be free. I didn’t have a body. In a way I was like the Musician.

I didn’t mourn my death, it was a comfort to have an answer to the question so many people ask. I kept painting, too. And soon I found that I was in one more way like the Musician. What I made seemed to manifest. A bright sun shining in a field of poppies, and I’d find myself in the field itself, not observing a painting.

Eventually, I began to experiment more. I made abstract and utterly weird pieces. With no thing as the subject, still the pieces manifested. Dark tones elicited a cynical response, the opposite with light. I perfected the formulas and found control.

I don’t see the Musician anymore. I suspect they can’t manipulate situations that don’t pertain to life, as I cannot. I’ve taken a similar role, scripting people’s highs and lows, the fall of a girl with the most vibrant green eyes. I don’t know how many of us there are, at least two though.

I suspect by the time this is read, many many years have passed. Such time has passed between the happening and the telling of these events, so much that I doubt anyone who reads this, even if they read it as I have written it, would have been alive when they occurred.

Or maybe they were, I don’t know everything. As I said, I cannot tell you everything about the Musician’s life, but I hope this information would be enough for you to piece together the idea of it.

This is my truth--of Musicians and Artists and whoever else is out there, weaving their stories together, rippling the waters of reality. Do with this story what you will.