X: Elegy | Silver-Tipped Swallow: "Debt Collector's Lullaby"
It takes you ten minutes after Google Maps insists you’ve arrived to make out the entrance of the girl’s favourite restaurant. Inside, it’s dimly lit, mostly empty, as though it might evaporate & leave you standing in the street if you looked away too quickly. You order the stuffed pita she pointed to on the online menu & called orgasmic with a spark in her eye. Your waiter sits across from you, folds silverware into cloth napkins, occasionally catches your gaze & ducks down into a grin. When you ask for your cheque he asks for a photo, so sorry I know you’re just here for lunch but I’m the biggest fan, & in that moment you are 17 again, whiskey glass ringed with red lipstick, the first time you’re ever recognised by a fan on the street. Profoundly, irrevocably aware of your name & the ways it has failed to save you, your body & the ways it has become public property.
When you left Singapore you thought you could escape the thin film of voices stretched taut over your skin: the house party where you learned that a boy you dated years ago is still telling anyone who will listen about the way you sound in bed. The high school friend mumbling it’s hard to relate to you now that you think you’re some kind of celebrity. The tearful confrontation, the recent ex yelling I loved the person you are in your poems, not the person I actually dated. You couldn’t be anonymous in the city that raised you so you fled, restrung the story, moved to New York to disappear.
& then the girl’s dog ambled up to you in a coffee shop in Brooklyn. She had never heard of you: a good sign. When she asked about work you changed the subject, & she didn’t push. Her smile was so big it blotted out the dusk, heat wave hopeful, like there was nowhere else it would rather be. You showed her your tattoo of her name, & you both laughed. You exchanged numbers. You did not call it fate.
/
Stop avoiding the subject. What you’re really trying to say, what you’re always trying to say, is you were a musician once. At this point it’s more courtroom evidence than the truth. There’s only so many times you can rewrite the same moment before it stretches out of memory’s skin & starts looking more like myth.
In every newspaper article about you they list out the big three, depression anxiety OCD, & leave out the most important one. Hyperacusis does not pass a copyeditor’s spell-check, but it lives in you, note held so long the sound becomes its own silence. You wooed the music for half a life until suddenly your throat was bloody, your hands empty, & you knew too late you’d been sharing a bed with darkness all along. It took as its dowry your piano, guitar, voice. Everyone grieved it more than they grieved you: eight years of classical training, down the drain. You’d been so talented, had such potential. Dream-logic, it never made sense, how one day you were playing sonatas & the next just stepping outside your house made your ears soar in pain. Even six doctors & four diagnoses later, you still haven’t woken up.
/
Slicking on mascara in the quiet before the club, you & M make a pact: every time you get recognised, I have to take a shot, & vice versa. The difference is that they walked into this with their eyes wide open. You want to say I was a kid. You want to say I didn’t know what I was asking for. But you let them tease you with every fan who asks for a selfie, take the shots you are offered. Unlike M, you flinch in the spotlight. You want to say no one warned me I’d never sleep again. Instead, while they are surrounded by a throng complimenting their outfit, you slip out the door without saying goodbye.
Only on the walk home, ears stinging with that familiar pulse, can you can finally admit to yourself that you’d be no one if you could still play. After song all you had left was words, & so you built a world out of them, because the real one didn’t know how to hold you. When reporters ask for the secret, you are good at hedging: hard work is a sweet way to say obsession. Pathology is prettier when masked in music. You spin a story of rising out of the ashes of tragedy, how you forged a new life for yourself when the old one was wrenched away from you. But the worst part of you is grateful to the illness. You kidnapped your own voice & then placed the ads in the newspaper asking for it back. You only grew a name off the eulogy you wrote for the part of yourself you killed.
It’s 2 A.M. & you’ve barely known her for a month, but the girl picks up the phone anyway, voice rasping with sleep. You’ve forgotten a coat so you stand outside shivering, smiling for the first time since M’s room. She says is everything okay & you say of course, sorry to wake you, I just wanted to hear your voice, & you haven’t sung in years but god, you’re still so good at lying through your teeth.
/
You don’t talk about it. When she kisses you on her front stoop all windswept & awake, when you sit at her kitchen table taking Zoom meetings across from her & receive hey, you’re pretty cute over text & try not to blush on camera, when she runs out to her car & drives to the front door in the middle of the blizzard so you don’t have to walk through the cold—you don’t talk about it. Better that way, before you say what needs to be said, before things can’t go back to the way they used to be.
You’re barely in New York anymore, anyway; you spend so much time travelling, performing, taming whatever story sells best that day to fit whichever crowd will catch it first. & still, between every city you find your way back into her bed, fervent & fabled, your copy of her house key the only true north. The fear isn’t new but the warmth is, & it keeps you awake long after she’s snoring next to you, arms sprawled because she still hasn’t learned that sleeping with another person means they get half the bed. In the mornings you shower off the plane smell together, & you recite poetry to her: you can fuck anyone, but with whom can you sit in water?
It isn’t a relationship. You have no time for the whispers that would come with one. But even so, like a friend who showed up on your doorstep without calling, you realise with a start that maybe the pull in your chest is happiness.
/
In Philadelphia, a man you’ve just hired gets you drunk & rails, take it down a notch, you’re not as famous as you think you are. In Ann Arbor, a reader tells you after a show that she is disappointed by your delivery of her favourite poem, that it was nothing like the way she’d imagined. In Singapore, a reporter calls you to say that his editor is pulling the piece he was writing about you because hyperacusis is not common enough to be a public interest story. In Brooklyn, the girl sees you through the window of the café where you first met, runs inside to kiss you, & all you can think is god I hope no one is watching.
I mean, if it wasn’t illness it would’ve been something else, right? But that’s a stupid hope to bare your neck to. The problem is it was illness. The problem is you’re surrounded by all the words you’ve ever wanted & even still your depth perception fails you, even still you’d give it all up for a single distant note.
/
A tenderness unfamiliar to you both: standing in her bathroom, naked in your socks, singing Sara Bareilles in poor harmony around the toothpaste in your mouths. She is not a singer & anywhere else in the world, neither are you. But here, in the cocoon of the bathroom mirror, the asterisk doesn’t matter. She says you have a beautiful voice & you glow, your reflections leaning into one another outside of your command, as if your bodies know something you don’t.
The next morning she plays her foldable piano: I’ll bow out of place to save you some space for somebody new / you can have Manhattan, ‘cause I can’t have you. Her chords are clumsy, & even six years after you last touched a piano, the instinct rears to put your hands on hers, correct her finger placement. She glances up, sees you studying her hands, asks if you want to play. She thinks she read somewhere that you used to be a musician. But maybe I’m making that up.
You forget, sometimes, that most of the people in your new life never knew you by music. Typical of you, to want it both ways—to vanish yet to never need to explain yourself, to be unknown yet understood, to die & sneak back to life only when it’s convenient for you. She’s still looking at you & all at once the glow is gone, & you don’t feel like putting yourself on trial for a person you are just beginning to love. No, you say. I never was. Watch as she laughs, sorry, I don’t know why I thought of it, & goes back to her poorly-enunciated chords.
/
You have your first fight in her apartment, next to her piano, after the biggest show you’ve ever played. She says what are you so fucking afraid of & you’ve just laid yourself raw in front of 3000 people but you can’t find the words with her eyes glinting into you like sun off a minefield—you want to say everything & not enough, you want to say haven’t you read my books when you’re the one who asked her not to, & the truth is so obvious that speaking it would shatter it, & you want to stop saying you. It was never about you, it was always about me, always about grief for a name I gave up willingly, the words I shove in front of me as stand-ins for love because one day I woke up without a tongue & I’ve never been certain of anything since. You take one pronoun & replace it with another but you’re still stuck in the same body, you still owe the past your life & every day it shows up to collect, & when she says I’m tired of being your secret you know the right answer, know exactly what prayer will invoke the miracle of your voice & its lack, where to enter the song so the wound doesn’t show, & you open your mouth & say nothing. Because it’s what hurts best. Because—look me in the face when you lie—because you chose this.
/
Almost seven years to the day after you touched a piano for the last time, you host your first book launch in New York. The room is packed, & when a performer plays your favourite song the girl films you from the audience, sitting backstage & silently mouthing every word with closed eyes: maybe forever is just for now / & I should rely on the up & down / as the moon will fall, the tide will fill the space. Shows you the video later, & when you laugh, this is embarrassing, she shakes her head. Not embarrassing. So goddamn beautiful. It isn’t always like this, but when it is, it feels like something worth writing down. Feels like the life you plagiarised to get to this place forgives you, even when you’re too proud to ask for it.
Before you got lucky, you wanted to be loved more than you wanted to be seen. Eyes wide, treble heavy in your chest, hold the note just a minute longer: there was a time when you owed the music nothing. When you knew how to love without looking over your shoulder. The world was mysterious once. If you close your eyes in the right key, you can almost hear it still.
(Silver-Tipped Swallow is a column by Topaz Winters about the ways in which music intertwines with our experiences in loving, losing, and lingering on what remains. This column, along with two more by the HM team and dozens more pieces of art, music, and writing by contributors, is published in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue X: Elegy. It is available for preorder now.)