"There There"

Flamingfud

What can I call this? Not really a short story, more of a mood piece, trying just to express one experience, one thing. Comments, please.

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The walls pulsated. The air itself vibrated to the kick of the bass drum. The shivering
guitar strings seemed to be symbiotic with my spine, resonating as one. As one haunting chord
followed another, I felt ice creep into my brain. I closed my eyes
and slipped silently into the world of noise. Sometimes, people craze for the moment of
silence in the cacophany. I'm too realistic for that. I look for the euphonic in the
cacophonic. And sometimes, I can find that. The antithesis of the dischordant din the world
produces isn't silence. It's this.

My body moves. I don't tell it to, but it does. The chorus begins.

My breathing shallows. The sweetly-pitched words echo through my head. Each sentence seems
start lower and rise higher, straining against the bounds of the mortality of the
singer. Almost Siren-like, the syllables pierce the air like golden arrows, humming, each in
a perfect harmony. Then, with ease, the flow changes.

Now it's dark. The chords tell no longer of a love gained, but of the darkness of despair,
the realisation that all that you felt was meaningless, that circumstance has intervened to
cause you despair. She is not what you thought. Or worse, she is exactly what you thought,
and YOU are not. The notes now seem to struggle against the music itself. The sweet harmony
is now filled with anger, with echoes of happier verses and days. The bass intensifies. I
feel like screaming.

Not a scream of despair, but a scream of energy. This anger, this pain is alive. And it
makes me alive. The wail of the chorus rises again, as if to scream for me. But it's
different this time. The bass, the anger, the distorted, sharp screams of a guitar in
bondage, the rhythmic punishment of the drumskins continues, but there is more. There are...
tiny saviours, like thin beams of sunlight through the clouds of a rainy day. Small,
honeyed, twinkling piano notes, the soft caress of a violins strings, the low mourning of
a horn.

Once more, the chorus builds, just once more. I can feel it. The music surges forward, as if
desiring to be ended, to be free. Each seperate melody builds, combines as I barely thought
possible. I understood harmony. But never like this. This was like discovering that each life
brought into the world cried in tune, and standing on top of a mountain as every single one
of them gathered in the valley below and loosed their recently formed lungs on the world.This
was unbearablely beautiful. This was everything. I was consuming the very soul of every
musician involved, for surely nothing this EPIC could have been produced with an ounce of
energy left in its' creators' hearts afterwards.

And suddenly, the instruments begin to fall away, like good men dying in the charge of a
battle. Then, all that remains is a solitary trumpet's moan, and the pounding of a drum.
And then the trumpet fades, and the final beats are as of my own heart.Then.... nothing.

I rolled over and jabbed the off-button on my stereo remote, slipping halfway out from under
my bedcovers in the process. I shook the last of my slumber's greyness from my head and stood
to face the day.

shiv

Excellent work flamingfud.
Very unique, beautifully descriptive and I love your analogies.
It doesn't matter how you define it, it has an eloquence all its own.
Like a lot of stuff on here, I wonder at its origins. Initially I thought this was a description of someone in a band, on stage, but doesn't look like it.
Good job.