Requiem

I used to be able to close my eyes and imagine a story to the sound of a classical piece. Requiems were visual epics – battles of vanguard armies on the most desolate lands I’d seen in books and on the net. When I close my eyes now, there’s a convoluted series of blurs. The veterans of battle I used to see, crisp with lines of experience drawing down their brow and mouth, are now blurs. The music is focused too much into my reality, now. A requiem blows life into my memories, vivid, excruciating life. All the horror I have culminates into each crescendo; all the heart-broken grief is palpable in one phrase.

Music brings me to tears as it always has; but the tears sting, now, like acid on my tear ducts. A conscience I hear rarely is soft and gloomy: you are broken, she says, you are a broken precious thing. But if you die now, she says, you die to the anthem of precious broken minds. The last thing you hear (she whispers now, coinciding with the falter of my heart) is a sound that complements the storm of thrashing, violent sounds inside you; wouldn’t that be nice? She is tired, and so her voice through all this is soft and passive. And because the tone is naturally hers, with years of dusty red tinged inside her throat, the suggestion is unbearably sincere.

She speaks almost as clearly as Mozart.