“Do you know this song?”

We’re sitting in a hundred waiting rooms, a hundred backseats, a hundred half-deserted parks, and it’s the same question and the same answer always, as he grins and sings along under his breath, swaying into me and taking the earbuds’ cord with him like an IV.

That’s him; half the lyrics and half the tapping strums of a guitar we dug out of who-knows-whose attic or basement or trash pile. Mesmerized by the grace of a note on the piano or the feral cry of a trumpet or the low, human hum of his own voice. Playing like every grace in his body culminated in this moment, here, himself and this instrument and me, in the middle of the night.

“No, no, wait, just listen,” he’d say. And I could do nothing but.

He might have killed and resurrected with those songs, with the cold they could bury where the heart should have been, with the warmth they wrapped around shaking fingers, like being born for a second time. Your first love and your last in the same moment. They were fire and they were magic: the crowding stars followed them like orchestra, the clouds gathered for their lullaby, the fireflies rose, enchanted from the grass. Minutes lent to him became hours, unashamedly.

It lingered, basked in itself even into its echoes, as if it could not stand to not exist, its player as lost as it was, fingers barely whispering over chords, mind in one of a world of peaceful places, or perhaps even here, floating above this moment. He looked up, finding me in his paradise, and not in disappointment.

“What do you think?” he let the last noise sink into the velvet darkness, and looked at me like I was a wanderer in his world, and I said I ached for it all over again.

The grand piano had been his grandmother’s, and it was the only artifact he’d begged to salvage from her creaking house. When the death of summer came, he turned to those worn-out keys and charmed the pale winter, too, inviting her to sit beside the fire, to dance amongst its flame. With raw and chapping lips, we hummed along to the voice of the howling wind; with half-aching souls, we fought to create our own living room suns.

And when we sheltered together from the mountain-foot snow, how much brighter they shined. For as much as he loved his magic, how much more did the world around him: the guests in their flannels and furs or the ghosts that traipsed over graying timbers. All danced to those wintertime hymns; all clapped and roared and loved.

He would often play for me, for only me, in empty houses and our friends’ backyards, laughing at nothing and everything, blonde hair shaking around his face as his fingers ran on. He’d motion for me to take the place on the bench next to him; closer to warmth and golden movement movement. On one occasion or another, he offered to teach me, and I, completely without such talent, could do nothing but turn him down.

“But I’m listening,” I’d say, and he’d smile at that and nudge me with his shoulder.

He was made of it, I think, created from it. He found it in the expansion of his lungs, the in-and-out of breath, the pounding of his heart. His soul slipping through the harmonious tunes, echoing in the rests, skipping along the strains. The Pacific-horizon of his eyes reflected it, as it stole into the inflections of his happiness, as it stole hours of sleep from the core of the night. Overwhelmed by it, he’d pull me in, an ever-captive audience, never unwilling.

We spent years like that, pretending that nothing could touch us, that nightmares could not exist for us so long as he played. In those days, we were happy— not happy in the temporary high that we often sought, but thoroughly satisfied with the effort we’d put forth to survive until this moment.

“Do you know this song?”

I think it’s familiar.

In those days, he was not scarred, not lost in the folds of photos we’d sought to burn, and I was not so anxious about the world outside of my own head. In those days, he was he, and I was I, happily in love with the art and its artist, happily the companion of the music maker, the one and only.