This Thing

An old man plays piano, his white hair pulled back in a ponytail on top, and his equally ancient mate plays guitar. Suddenly, the sound of trumpet appears and the ponytailed man is playing piano and accompanying himself on the horn, and just as suddenly you are plunged, down into memory, and the face of a boy full of mischief on whose bed you used to teenage lie while he played records he’d bought from the record shop in the arcade, so desperate to share, to educate, to bring you to life and show you the things that have meaning. You’re plunged and you don’t care that the room is full of people. You’re miles away, in another time, and the music isn’t the thing that’s carried you. Not really. It’s that trumpet and that piano and that face that tells you to Listen, just listen, Bird. Really fucking listen.

So you sit, and you listen, and you’re lost, and you suppose it is the music that has pulled you, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like something else. Something that won’t be named, won’t be caught, won’t belong.

And later, not that much later, you’re out and carrying Georgia On My Mind into the street, away from the music that has no hold on you now. You think of Ella singing Georgia. And you’re swinging through the streets, high on a mix of sadness, love, and booze and pizza.

This thing, this feeling, this memory of someone you don’t yet know and yet you know so well, walking there beside you, laughing there beside you, almost invisible, but perfectly there. This thing, this feeling, this memory you have will explode one day. It’s going to explode, just like you’re going to die. He told you that tonight. He told you, half laughing, half not, and you felt your eyes widen at the truth. Not the truth that you will die. That’s an old truth. Your eyes, they widened at that feeling of sadness and love and not enough booze then and definitely no pizza then. So the sadness and the love, then. Your eyes widened at that truth.

Three hundred and eighteen days older than you for almost thirty four years, and now no more. Now you’re older than him, swinging down the street, high on this feeling of sadness and love, and isn’t that the funny thing?

You remember the love and no sadness. A song of you, sweet and clear as moonlight. And then the cloud that came and covered it over and left the sadness and not the love, like a hard thing in your belly.

There are too many street lights, and how high the moon? You don’t even bother to look, you’re so sure it isn’t there. Because he’s the moonlight now. This one. He’s the sadness and the love. He’s the booze and the pizza by now as well, and you’re swinging through the streets, slipping through them so fast, on your way somewhere new. And you’re high, and feeling alive. Pushed and squeezed and challenged and alive. And even if he isn’t the sadness and the love after all, even if it’s just the trumpet singing with the piano and the memory of that bedroom and those records all that long long time ago that have tricked you into this feeling, even if he isn’t the thing you think he is, this is going to explode, like a sudden trumpet burst. And you’re going to feel even more glad that you’re alive. Living and so fucking alive.

And you swing through the streets and you find another bar, and he’s almost invisible, almost inconsequential. Except he’s there and you know it. He is the moonlight. He is the sadness and the love. And you are fucking alive.

© J R Hargreaves 2006