The silence that surrounded Lia
was just like the kind in movies, she thought as she walked through a thick fog
to get to the café where a woman named Myra played once a week. It was the kind
of silence that’s intentional (one can only assume, if this had been a movie)
where the director is saying, ‘Pay attention to this,’ in a way one may feel
more inclined to sit up and listen than if some string arrangement had been
chosen. It was not to be taken lightly, that space in between sound, Lia
thought as she pushed the door of the café open and her ears were flooded with
a sudden wave of noise she could only describe as one too many conversations
trapped in the walls of one little place. Perhaps if she left the door open a
little while longer the hums, if one had to fit the sounds into one little
word, would make their way out and spread upwards to the sky. But as the door
quickly shut behind her, all hope of such a thing was lost and the noise was
contained like corn in a can.
She headed towards B5, otherwise
known as her ‘usual’ table and watched as Myra began to settle herself into
place behind her piano. Lia’s coffee came with a mere nod that told the waiter,
“Everything would be the same today.” She liked for things to be the same for
the most part. Change for the sake of it seemed unnecessary to her when things
were quite fine as-is. It was a habit she’d had for ages, she thought as she
warmed her hands over the coffee mug’s steam—starting from the pair of pajama
pants that literally had to fall apart before she could part with them as a
kid; her mother had to insist profusely before Lia eventually gave in as it was
getting rather cold during the night with all those holes. But even then she’d
kept them in a drawer for “sentimental value” and just recently stuffed them
way in the back of another so that no one could visibly accuse her of being
somewhat of a nut—they were after all just a pair of raggedy pants for God’s sake! But it was hard to
find things that fit just right, and even harder to part with when they no
longer did.
It was the same where everything else was concerned, she
supposed. This café. The music. The coffee. This table. It wasn’t that she consciously chose
the same pattern each time. It was just that they fit right, that’s all.
A “la-da-di-da…” revived Lia from
thoughts of her old pajamas and worn out habits, reminding her why she had come
in the first place. Myra hummed softly along to her usual arpeggio of chords as
she warmed up, then announced a couple of minutes later to what must have been
a lip reader adjusting the levels on the mixer, “Okay, I’m ready.”
It was her hands Lia enjoyed the
most. She watched Myra’s fingers dancing upon the piano keys like little
ballerinas. She could fall in love with any pair of beautiful hands. She
recalled a boy from 6th grade who was just horrible (in the eyes of
all the wise 11-year-olds) and played the clarinet just as horribly (which
could’ve been proven). He was the weird kind that other kids rolled their eyes
at, but she was secretly in love with his hands. They were perfect.
The sound of the piano made her
heart jerk like electricity had just passed through it. She figured it must have somehow
slipped into her chest, jammed into her heart and the keys had grown from there
as the more than decade-old clarinet squeaks from beginning band disoriented
her attention.
She
turned to Myra and watched her like a television set.
It all seemed vague, everything
around her, at that instant. Perhaps it was due to the fact that a group of
people sat at a table near enough for their dialogue to be overheard. It was
horrible when people’s loudness spread beyond those intended, especially when
it was so blah that it made her want to vomit. She’d much prefer her own
company to that any day of the week,
which was usually the case. But it suddenly felt odd at that moment, too—if one
really thought about it—to be in the same room, just a couple of feet away
even, from complete strangers. It was like sitting in one’s house and sharing a
couch with a bunch of weirdoes that just happened to drop in off the street
‘cause the door was open and they thought they’d come in and watch a little
television. Well, that wasn’t likely to happen, but it sure felt funny if one
really thought about it. She raised her eyebrows and watched the loudmouth at
the table next to her and imagined him right there on her living room sofa
slurping a coke—quickly shaking her head at the thought.
But everything had always felt
vague, Lia figured as she returned to where she was last perplexed—as if it
were her sole purpose to leave nothing unexplained as she trotted along the
streets of her mind looking for the address of a place where it all came
together and formed a little sense. She found nothing as Myra began her set and
released a sense of familiarity inside her chest that felt like coming home
after a long first day in a new place, and it didn’t seem to matter anymore.
The music began filling up the
spaces of each face that had wandered off beyond the conversation surrounding
them, which—she thought, glancing suspiciously at the guy who’d yet been able
to give his mouth a rest, as if he were the reason everything was so wrong in
the world—must have failed to reel them in deep enough to care for more.
But it was so easy for one to
fall victim to distraction, she grinned. It was almost alluring really, to fall
into a pretense that the body and mind didn’t have to coincide if one chose for
them not to. It was sometimes the only way, really, for one to pretend that
they were in fact there in the space their body idly occupied, when they truly
were not— they never were. They were flying a million miles away as their head
nodded automatically every five seconds on autopilot, if they cared enough to
feign any interest for the sake of another in the first place, and hung on only
by a string that if cut off would cause their minds to roam even higher into
the sky like a balloon freed into the clouds, never to return.
Myra’s voice resounded in Lia’s
ears like poetry, if one found such a nicely grouped set of words flattering,
and whatever it was that may have been proceeding beyond table B5 and the short
path that led to the red-haired woman behind the black piano became nothing at
all. The noise, even that irritating kind that came from not so far to her
left, drowned off into the distance and she was sure that this was all that she was in this world for (if she wished to
question her existence in that particular instant)—to listen to a few songs.
It was like jumping off a cliff and finding out she could
fly.
She sank her head back into the
chair and whispered along her most recent favorite line, “I put the hood right
back where you could taste heaven
perfectly.” And she almost could, she thought as she rolled her tongue
around in her mouth, searching for heaven which must’ve been just around the
corner. The words wrapped around her like a warm blanket on a snowy day until a
sudden irritation crept into her back and shook her wide awake.
As she pulled her head back into
its upward position she couldn’t be sure if she had drifted into sleep or if
the world truly was dissolving into
the background as her eyes turned everything in sight into a blur. She could
only hear laughs coming from that stupid table cutting through the right of way
the music possessed like a sharp-bladed knife. They weren’t even of the
contagious kind, their laughs—the kind one found oneself unconsciously smiling
along with. Instead they were the kind that provoked irritated stares that
declared nothing was that funny.
But it didn’t matter much, she
supposed, now that everyone had turned into vague shadows, like lightly shaded
pencil drawings with a tint of color here and there which reminded her of art
class in high school when her art teacher used to tell her to press harder with
her pencil to make her shading boldly stand out like reality—when she had loved
it soft and almost fragile on the paper like daydreams.
Lia blinked violently and rubbed
her eyes as if she had just been attacked by a sand storm. The people
surrounding her slowly began to resume their former states of being as her eyes
went through what seemed to be a water-colored painting which led one through a
dark tunnel beyond which the world soon began to resemble itself again—but when
the darkness ceased, one found out that it really didn’t.
The music was there still,
flowing like a river that she rode a little canoe upon, lying down and staring
at the sky ‘til it tipped over into the ocean and threw her so far down she was
sure she’d drown.
The water fell into her lungs
like a cool breeze that made her presume she had turned into a mermaid. But as
she stared down at her feet and realized she was in fact not, she thought maybe
this was that very thin line between this and that, and there was no way she
could ever make her way to either side. This would be the place where she would
spend the rest of eternity.
And as she pushed the door open and walked out onto the hazy
street again after all that applause resounded in her mind and made her ears
feel like they were sure to burst like a couple of used up speakers, the hums
crept out from all around her like ants. And when there was nothing left but
the silence that became her, she surrendered herself to the fog and faded away
inside it.
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