Fin, or A Thing Like Music

My mother taught me that music can mean different things each time it is listened to. Sometimes a piece means all the same things it has meant before, but not always. It changes, she told me, depending on where you are in life. "Music is a journey," she said. "There is a beginning. There's a middle. There's an end." But music never really ends. She said that contradictions don't always matter in music, that a piece can end and not end because it lingers in your soul and it solidifies into a part of the core of you even if the air you're breathing gives up all of its vibrations. She told me always to listen to life's greatest music, the kind that sits in your core.

She poured me tea and the tea was steaming while she said: "No matter what you're doing, be sure to listen to the music." She said it means something that's difficult to say with words, that that's why we have composers. They speak a different kind of language, tell different kinds of stories. She told me that they're strange, composers. That music is strange, but to never forget to listen.

I'm her strangest son, she told me, so I must listen to the strange ones. I just might understand them.

No matter what I am doing, I must also listen.

It's hard because I'm bad at multitasking.

________

I'm walking alone beneath the drunken sway of tree branches when I hear "Prelude" from Dmitri Shostakovich's suite titled The Gadfly. Leaves fall in front of and behind me. The prelude gives new form to the tension of that falling, to that battle between where the leaves are and where gravity is pulling them, and I know that we are all falling leaves and that this music is speaking about all of us—but the falling of the leaves is easier to think about than the ways in which we fall, so I watch these leaves and I am silent.

The park is quiet except for "Prelude" from The Gadfly and the footfalls of people I don't know.

There are people out walking, running, walking their dogs, running their children. Faster, one mother says, and her voice pierces The Gadfly and the footfalls of all the others. You will not beat your time unless you run faster. I see her child run faster and I hear her footsteps. I wonder what her time means to the child, and what it means to the mother. I am sure the meanings are not the same.

The violins swell, close to a climax, and the mother is quiet again. The high strings are getting ready to meet God, but they can't quite contain the complexity of those implications. They're oozing with compassion and trepidation and smiles and teardrops. I look for the source of the music, but I cannot find it.

My heart is warm. It's beating.

The music gets louder, and I trip on a root. I'm unsure when it was I'd left the concrete trail, but I'm under a tree now, so I guess I had made that decision at some point. I land on my hands and pain shoots through my wrists. Shit, I think. I need those.

It feels like I landed on an acorn. I check my hands. I'd landed on an acorn.

"Are you okay?"

I look around. "Who said that?" I ask. "I mean, no, I'm not, but who said that?"

La, la la laaa, la-la, say the violins. They're swelling and they glisten. The violinists are asking God and the cosmos to give me happiness, special wellsprings of joy meant just for me. They are begging with their violins and I do not believe they will succeed, but at least they try. I feel honored that they try for me.

He's here, in front of me, the man who asked if I was okay. The music is so loud, but I'm...