If you could transmute silk into music, it would sound like the violin.
What I like about classical music: I can listen to it even when I’m not listening. With, say, rock or rap, I need to tune it out to gather my thoughts. But with violins, it’s different.
This is a blessing.
The Modigliani string quartet, four men, black shoes, black suits, black hair, and white ties; all of them, all at once, suck in their breath, lean back, like throwing a punch, and with a flourish, strike the fist note.
Violins playing is like looking at the world through a waterfall.
Tonight, this is a curse.
My mind wanders. I think of you, what you told me last week. "I don’t want a relationship." What does that mean?
The artists sway with their rhythm. One melody swings around, piggybacking another. Distilling one long note into the emotion of a lover’s voice. Pure and so frail, just like life.
Did I want a "relationship?" What made you think I did?
The sound of the music, now like an oak tree, full and sonorous. Low, like a hungry animal.
Now as high as a songbird in the morning. Dainty and light, like petals.
And why not a relationship? Are you too lazy? Too selfish? Are you seeing someone else?
Sometimes the one on the left likes to put his ear all the way up to the violin, like it’s whispering secrets to him.
For the faster bits, his hand moves frantically, like a sewing machine, like he’s slicing meat.
So hungry.
Is it me? Am I not worth the space on the bed? The jabbing interruption, occasionally, of my voice in the room? The hours in the morning with me and only me? The hand, lost inside mine, when we sit together in the dark?
And sometimes, he leans into the violin’s neck, all the way up to the scroll at the tip, as though he might fall off the end of the note.
