All Thoughts Fly

Afterwards, we lay in the car, the condensation beading on the glass. For an age, neither of us spoke; we both knew that that would be the last time this would happen. With your head on my chest I could barely hear your words, but you were mumbling, almost to yourself-

– “It feels like being home, for the first and only time. But then I always have to wake up out of it and it’s almost too much to bear.”

Finally we opened the doors, the dull ache in my joints and cooling sweat making the car uncomfortable. We sat above the city, perched on the squat rocks that jutted from the moors. The silence sat between us, on that edge between comfort and hesitancy. You pulled your jacket tighter and shivered, the dusk air cooling around us by the second.

Above us, a plane traced the sky, marking a sigil in its holding pattern. The glow of the lights below tinged the clouds orange and as we quietly moved closer, instinctively drawn to warmth, there was a hushed anticipation in the air. I closed my eyes, thinking of the druids that had carved the markings on the granite under me, and suddenly, clearly, I could hear great, sad music filling the air. Impossibly but unmistakably it was coming from above, from out of the huge grey sky.

Organs tumbled over themselves, impossibly fast arpeggios cycling over and over; fifths and octaves repeating in sequence and cascading together, at times seeming to move out of sync but always reconciling. Moments of modality were resolved time and time again, as the intensity grew. It felt like a sound born out of time itself, somehow both emotional and yet free from human intervention; a locked, looping torrent of notes diverging and converging, over and over again.

My eyes still squeezed shut, I reached for your hand and enfolded it; a small coldness with a larger warmth surrounding. You squeezed back but in the instant that you did, the music faltered – the notes started to drift out of time, and a faltering hesitancy in the rhythms slowed the oncoming notes to a trickle.

The last chimes sounding in my ears, I opened my eyes. You were smiling but through a face wet with tears. Below us, the lights of the city slowly started to wink out, one by one.