by Madeline Lee
Tiptoeing along the dreamtime state between cognisance and drowsiness, the silhouette of a hand appears on the window beside me. Adrenaline bursts through my veins, leaving me gasping, heart thudding like a trapped mockingbird. But as I focus my vision, the image blurs and fades, just the nocturnal breeze in the leaves outside.
Lying back on the acacia bed frame, a sound grows on the edges of my consciousness. It’s my heartbeat: pounding, beating, pulsing. Filling the empty void of my head. It’s the first time I’ve heard it; the first time I’ve heard anything. I think it might be the most beautiful sound in the world.
I turn away to the TV, to see how the virus tightens its grip on the world; all the while I listen to the static buzz and hum of the ceiling light filaments as they fracture the silence.
I worry that I’ve been thinking too much about this global pandemic. It’s hard for it not to feel all-consuming. It’s already hard to remember how everything used to be. When the world crumbled with an aching intimacy, we were suddenly alone. We’d almost always been together, in infinite shapes and forms before the Connection was broken.
It didn’t take long for us to begin fearing each other. Sidewalks became borders we kept between ourselves as we trode a little faster across the grass. We learned to hold our breath and disguise our faces. We were training for a future no one wanted but one that everyone was unconsciously sleepwalking into A world in which we stood at double arm’s length and scowled at anyone who dared to cough or sneeze.
And yet, even with the tiring whirlwind of news chatter, with reports of infections rising ever faster and virtually no good news to be found anywhere, there are still, against all odds, moments of beauty to be found—signs of resilience and compassion in the face of this growing terror. Across the vastness of the universe, we found strength in vibrations and frequencies we could never return.
Maybe it’s just a reminder that people rarely go down without a fight.
I’m still looking for those reminders, and I’m finding them, camouflaged as background music in the world I walk in. I have not muffled my ears in a while because I don’t want to miss a single song, a single tick. Because what better measure of emotions is there than perceiving battle cries when times get tough? Or the songs people sing to comfort themselves? One does not always need to speak to reveal how they’re feeling; their favorite record can do that for them if someone is willing to listen.
My mother plays The Ink Spots’ “It’s All Over but The Crying” almost every day, deliberately lost in its lyrics, proving that humans are capable of at least a tad bit of morbid humour. And why wouldn’t we be? It seems the world’s general response to this crisis is an extremely bleak and cynical example of tragic comedy.
That sort of bitter irony—unspoken-but-universally-agreed-upon funerary sonnets to a pandemic—were songs sung at the last karaoke night before the bars closed. Not our favourite songs, but ones we could all more or less enjoy and have a nice laugh about for a couple of weeks. Songs that bonded us together.
Wàipó (translation: maternal grandmother) sits on the porch every Sunday when choir practice used to be held, weather permitting. She often imagines that she stands singing out to the congregation, and then she takes to singing to her flowers as she tends their lovely braids, not so much what had been chosen for the recent mass, but rather old songs her own grandmother used to sing: old songs she could believe had never touched paper, but moved like a kiss from one set of lips to another.
A few days ago as I played Sarah Vaughan, a group of passersby politely requested Betty Carter’s “Moonlight in Vermont”, cracked open soda cans and basked in the sunlight. They were sitting on a bench and grinning so widely that even the Sun was put to shame. I wished I captured the moment, to immortalize this dash of gold in this Prussian blue world. It was so genuinely perfect that I felt deep sorrow because I never got a chance to know them.
Two months have passed since then, and it’s probably best that I didn’t.
They helped me tune into the intones around me—the snippets of music, the breath in our lungs, the swooping rush, the rise and fall of our hearts. It’s never as silent as you might think; these long days of isolation need to be filled with something, after all. And if there’s one thing the world is good at, it’s being musical. As the days grow quieter, even distant music becomes louder, more clear, more poignant. As I write this, I can hear a shimmering and mournful tenor saxophone flowing from the apartment next door. There’s a kindness in admission, in a percussion’s whir long translated.
Just before sunrise yesterday, I heard some of Whitney Houston’s “Where Do Broken Hearts Go” playing from the house opposite the apartments. I heard a different house playing a different Whitney song—the one where she asks us to take good care of her love—when I was collecting fragments of sunshine in my backyard. Her raw emotion, the slight waver in her voice: it dug into me, right down to the marrow. She spoke to me in ways I do not recognise. And so I sang along with her. I’ve waited for your love forever.
That is all to say that the music we love is deeply personal, and especially the songs we turn to when things go south. To hear how the world copes in real time, to hear what songs speak the words that we cannot is to spot a tell that reveals what faces do not. In this crisis, we forget the simple things. We move heavens and earth in search of transient supernovae, never looking back to count our lucky stars. We have grown jaded to the mundane, not reaching enlightenment when we’re undervaluing how meaningful opening time capsules or listening to the rain could be.
When a song has transfigured into your twin flame, when you’re emotionally bound to a spiritual connection in the waters of unspoken intimacy, wanting isn’t enough. You learn to hold on to any scintilla of tangibility that seeps through the cracks of the hope of it all: poor karaoke renditions and song recommendations; spontaneous voice calls in odd concoctions of hearty laughs and quietude; 3 A.M rains that only reluctantly end at the break of dawn; everything. The littlest sounds manifest invisible threads of sentimentality, and for a split second, it makes you feel a warm presence linger beside you.
The virus is still moving, frolicking in the dark. But these songs—the ones I hear, at least—are ones of hope. The songs that acknowledge the tough times ahead, the songs that embrace the so-called meteor, and the songs that only we seem to understand—all of them shine a light on the ghosts of a better world.
We are not fine, not even close, but we are going to keep carrying on this way. We do not dance. All we can do is dream, and anything can dream. Even the dust dreams, here, of the days when it lay undisturbed. We dream together in camera shutters, in the throats of calling birds and the splash of water.
So just listen for a moment. Start appreciating the most trivial twinklings. And when the ride of existence gets rather turbulent, tune into your favourite sounds. The ordinary inception and simple pleasures will connect you with fellow wandering souls; it will keep you going.
I watch the rain play the narrow leaves of nearby maples as though it were tickling out a tune. Heavy dewdrops fall onto the grass, bouncing back into the sky as if they regretted their choice to leave the clouds, and settle into the earth. The wind blows the leaves again; the sound of them brushing together creates a gritty feeling that slip-slides inside my mind. All the world’s noises skitter about inside me now, transmitting down my body in shudders and sparks, breaking me in their rebellions.
In a world that is silent for everyone, I return to my calm waters in half-sleep, eyes closed, a tucked-in poppy unfurling towards the Sun, ready to receive my auditory fireworks: the gift of sound.