He spoke a step above a whisper. The girl's eyes were wide with curiosity as his soft, but powerful words escaped him without restraint.
"They say there are songs out there that are so beautiful you cannot hear them through your ears. They say songs of that sort just drift through your bones like a tunnel. They echo. They scrape against your bones in a delightful manner and nestle themselves within the walls of your heart. Then you find yourself singing that song for weeks upon weeks, whistling it when before you weren't even a whistler. Do you believe it?"
He turned his dark eyes to the girl still fiddling with her long and tangled braid, as if to find her weeping by his prophetic revelation. Instead he grabbed her hand for a moment, ceasing her incessant fiddling and watched her sad posture depress into a heap of elegiac fabric. The tops of her eyelids were shiny like the gloss of black on her long, long eyelashes. Her cheeks were red. Something wasn't right.
"Well?" He half shouted in the dark.
Her slim shoulders slumped ever so slightly as no reply wandered from her lips.
He sighed.
"Look, " he began quiet, quiet as a bird before the sun has stretched, "I know you understand what I'm talking about. I've seen it within you before. When you think no one is watching you turn your headphones on and wake up your whole disposition--your bones, your braid, your face, everything--with a song. You walk around for hours, sometimes retracing the tracks of your mind you thought were empty and you listen. God only knows what you listen for, but I can see it in the scrunch of your eyes closing, in the slow of your breath and the stolen moment of drifting out of reality to some far and wild place. Sometimes you bite your lip, maybe to remind yourself of pain, to remember you're still alive. I don't know. Other times you're eyes are wide open looking far past whatever material is before them. You cry. You smile. You let the folds of your face fall into the face that is really yours. Your real, real face. I see you when you think no one is watching and you look like rain is falling on your face every moment you turn those blue headphones on. You look like you're actually living. Is that not what you live for, rainy girl? Can you not hear the music I am speaking of?"
He could see her posture shift from angry to sad to nothing at all. She wasn't happy, she wasn't sad. Perhaps she is both? The boy did not know.
Suddenly, a slight shift. A smile. Her eyes were no longer on the floor but falling into his deeply.
Her voice was scratchy for a moment, bruised on the first few words she whispered, but jumbled into sweetness as the words escaped, "Do you really think I'm pretty?"
The boy was red. His heart beat louder than the words that tumbled from him, probably much louder than he meant, "What? Didn't you hear what I just said?"
Her cheeks were ridged from her smile tugging harder at her lips.
"Sure I did." she replied softly. "You said you watch me when I listen to my music. Who would do that if they thought I was ugly? No one watches a human for that long if they think they're ugly. It just doesn't happen unless you're insane. Are you insane boy?"
He couldn't stop his heart from racing, but he couldn't answer her question either. If he answered or if he remained silent he was revealing something he didn't want to within himself.
He coughed.
He rubbed his nose.
The girl liked it when he rubbed his nose.
"Look, girl. I recognize a believer when I see one and you, " he blushed again as his eyes scrambled away from her, "are a firm believer in something. I can feel it. You reek of it. Won't you tell me what you believe in?"
His words were desperate. As if he'd been waiting to hear her speak all his life. As if she decided not to tell him whatever it is he was looking for, he would die. A part of him would die if this girl didn't speak about herself, about him. About something from her jungle of a mind.
He waited.
His heart raced on still.
She trembled. Something slipped from within herself. A tear choked itself from the weeds of her eyelashes, but she didn't move her small hand to wipe it away. She just let it drip and slide and puddle on her lips. She didn't move until the boys lips rang soft and small against her cheek, her ear, her hair. Slowly he slipped his gentle hand into her hair and tucked it snug behind her ears as he'd always wanted to do.
She smiled through her tears, making rain upon her beautiful face.
Her heart pounded too. It was quick as butterfly wings and the sound of summer on the grass.
"You want to know my secrets? You want to know what makes me find my tunnel songs?"
He fell close to her as she spoke, not wanting to miss a minute of her soul peaking from within her chest. It glowed. How it glowed so brilliantly when she talked he didn't know whether to shield it his from his dark eyes or simply go with it.
His heart still raced madly.
He simply went with it.
She didn't even see it when she talked. All she saw was the rain.
"When I'm lonely, I turn to one song. One song that doesn't make me 'feel better' or block out the feelings of loneliness, but rather explodes all the feelings I felt too numb to feel before I began listening to it. I listen to one song that is soft and fierce and honest. It is sad as it is happy. Somehow both at the same time. I listen to it fall into my eardrums and trickle down my ribs until it reaches my heart. Then I stop. I turn it as loud as I can allow myself in that moment and I just listen to it while I can feel it. I can feel it so badly it almost hurts. But it doesn't. It feels...clean. Simple. Marvelously alive."
The boy was quiet as he dare asked, "What is it? What do you feel?"
She sniffled for a moment, fiddling with her braid once more. Her eyes were almost closed again and how the boy wished she wouldn't--wouldn't stop, wouldn't close those precious eyes, wouldn't look down at the ground as if she wasn't worthy of looking up.
He also wished so fiercely she wouldn't feel so sad all the time. He could see it when she was asleep, her head bumping softly against his shoulder in the car. The look of pained sleeping tortured him. When the wrinkles on your face are drawn from sadness more than joy, that is when he knew you didn't sleep like most people do. That is what he saw when she slept. When she slept she looked like a heavy weight was being conflicted in her mind rather than the dreams of peace that should be flooding behind her closed eye lids. She should look younger when she slept, but she didn't. She looked alone.
The girls fingers were devouring a piece of paper he didn't even notice was there before. It was in shreds on the floor. It looked like petals from a flower; a little girl deciding if a boy loved her or not.
His fingers tangled up in hers. She stopped her fiddling once more.
"I'm sorry." She whispered through the tears that fell on her lap. "I don't know how to stop."
He pulled her head into his chest and allowed her to hear the sound of his racing heartbeat. It was the bravest thing he'd ever done.
She could feel it too.
"You want to know what I feel when I hear a tunnel song?" They were quiet. The boy could only stare at the girl in a wide complexity of emotions. She had to pull herself away from the distraction of his enthralling heartbeat as she finished softly, "I feel like this."
In her surge of bravery, she sat up and looked at him for a moment, both blushing in a rosy cloud hovering all around them. Her teeth sank into her lip in innocent nervousness as she placed her pale hand over his loud metronome and fell softly and sweetly in love with the way her heart plummeted into her stomach and flew back up into her chest like a wild song bird as she felt it. She felt the reason for his living.
It was her.
The boy felt brave.
"What's the name of that song you listen to? Your tunnel song?" He whispered it perfectly quiet and loud.
She was a little afraid, but not of him and not enough to stop the words that were already coming from within her, "My deepest secret is--it isn't one song. My tunnel song is whatever song holds the most truth for me at the time I am listening to it. It's the song that is the most honest and the most beautiful to me. It's the song that hurts me while it heals me."
Suddenly the boy understood.
It was like a reckoning of childhood and sleeping, only he was fully awake while it happened, understanding her. She was still a mystery in many ways, but the greatest thing about this moment was the boy feeling like he understood her perfectly in some small or huge way.
one.
two.
three heartbeats.
She was alive.
Without a thought of what would happen if she didn't hear him, without a care if he should live or die if he said it, the boy's voice grew from his heart and echoed through his throat as he exclaimed,
"If you're lonely, lonelier than you can ever bear, wake me. I don't care where you are. I don't care what time it is, what is making you sad, who is there, who isn't there--wake me. I want to hear you. I want to hear everything about you."
In some small way, between the beginning of the boy speaking and the end of all his words, the girl thought she heard him say, "I love you."
She was right.
...
(part I)
-k.p.b.
2:47p.m.
may 12th, 2016
thursday
*my "tunnel song": Wake Me by: Bleachers (as of right now, in this moment of time)
