Bite-Sized Symphony
Trust in cosmic winks from classical blushes.
There’s so much noise everywhere lately. Can’t you hear it? It’s as though the cathedrals are open at all hours, with orchestras playing incessantly. The lower half of my body is disintegrating. I fear opening my eyes and seeing hooves and wings, but this song rides out in my ears. Over ice-cube clouds, birds the size of giants soar through a sky on fire. Where have all the children gone? Far, far away it seems, on a distant adventure. Amid all this clanging and doom, the four of us unite through strangerhood. Congenially quiet, we sit here listening to what feels like a lullaby of God’s memory.
And isn’t it glorious? Of all the places to be alive, we get to be here and now, hearing the condensed voices of angels through strings and horns. I feel as though we are royalty, when in another time it would not be suitable for people like us to hear such majestic music. We gather as one, but we are preoccupied. We appear to be in the presence of one another on behalf of entirely different ideologies. There will be a day when none of us wishes to ride the metallic horses of this apocalypse, and no one waits within these sacred spaces. The crowds will grow smaller, the basilicas will burn down, yet the music will never cease.
For now, we funnel ourselves through a spectacle of meaning, eating whatever is in front of us. You will laugh in just about a minute, thinking that is the climax, but when this ride ends and you forget the glow of every altar, would laughter be enough? We are at the lowest rung, waiting in the passageway of the next millennium. When the dizzy song is over, everyone will disperse to wait in line for deep fried somethings. If we had a divine parabolic microphone, you would hear the archangels building pyramids underneath the salted brimstone while we swim above their oils. Tonight we shall be frozen in bed, separate once again; subconsciously pulled by the power felt from sharing a taste of our bite-sized symphony.
We could have waltzed in the palace of eternity over the past three minutes, my friends, but our moment has passed. I take my purse and rise from the cold metal bench. The old merry-go-round sputters its final notes of Tchaikovsky into the carnival air, fading from before us to behind us. Long after the lights go dark tonight, the masterpiece sleeps to survive, carrying itself through us into the morning whether we remember it or not.
