The invisible pauses that made our music

It’s easy to understand the notes that created our ballad as you truly appreciate what each pause meant

Yes it feels like you are invoking an invisible body as we discuss a rest in between the notes itself, but if we did not have the pauses

We wouldn’t have the music

We wouldn’t understand the feelings

The lack of feelings

The eerie sense of belonging and dread that cohabits in the space of a rest.

Brace yourself, if you’re allowed, as you come to finally understand the depths that one has to come to when they finally see the final, thick double bar that sticks to your ear like a candy that is too sticky

In the beginning:

Da Capo:

You had a full rest between the notes, you could breathe, the music they swooned into your ear was at a walking pace—-Andante

You could comprehend the cruelty “whore”

And it began like simple shrug and courting

Sprinkles of rests in between half-rests for half a note and you couldn’t think anymore

“Stop wearing those skirts. They don’t look as good as you think they do.”

“Don’t brush your hair in that flat way, I like your hair curly—-

Then the middle: The Fermata (Pause): you were the conductor and you held these pauses so long I couldn’t remember how to breathe

“Oh, it was your birthday? Was that your mom that called to say Happy Birthday? I’m so sorry I forgot.”

The longest pause was after you had stopped beating me, your drum solo was self-gratifying and full of ego

You extended the

Invincible hold you had on me

The fermata that clutched my knotted hair (from not brushing my hair anymore in hopes to please you because I never paused unless you told me to)

Long, so eternally long, and then—-

The end that is also the beginning: the Caesura:

Tattered, creeping spaces that felt like choked helium escaping out of a balloon into your lungs

The battered, sporadic, random, erratic pauses that shattered the movements

The frantic, dramatic pause that was louder than any punctuated section

Of the opus and then you got creative

And used the fermata, barraging my skull with an enclosed, elongated

Caesura

The knots in my head matching the knots in my heart and hair, a Glissando

You slide between the notes, so fucking slick

Forcing me to causally lie through each rest that you made me so happy,

But screw these metaphors and similes and allegories and whatever bullshit we stuff our

Brains with to process these unreal concepts that feel like the height of hell, the weight of mountains, the fierceness, cruelty, coldness of the Sea

You damned the flow with those notes, those pauses, those rests

It’s no wonder we tremble when too many rests crumble our masks when we

Find ourselves trying to

Hear a broken song.