7/365: A Blue Morning

Speakers//John McEnroe//Tulips//Magic

School run and the sky blue, bluer than it’s been in weeks, rooftops white and the clouds of smoke from boiler flues the same and car windscreens frosted with engines idling as the ice melts; over the clifftop, the sun white and low, and me knowing how perfect this would be by the beach, but no time to walk down; instead it is school drop off and walk through the park, ice on the pond frozen thicker than it’s been all winter, geese pecking seed from grass crisp with rime. My lungs burn from the sharpness of it all, this cold edged cold edging into my hands. My nails bluing, the scar from a pan handled clumsily from the oven months ago, purpling. It feels like being back in my skin, my body knows this weather more than any other, remembers this gripping, biting cold, these sharp blue skies. Only the light is wrong. Further north is has a different timbre, as if it vibrates along a different frequency and I am three again and peeling the fronts from the giant speakers in the sitting room - are they giant or am I just small - I peel the front to see magic in action, the bass speaker vibrating behind the protective cover. I put my hand against it and feel it travel right to the centre of my chest. This is how I learn, music is motion, sound, feeling and rhythm all at once. It is like nothing else. It is my mother’s heartbeat outside of me, it is my father’s soft low voice always somewhere, over there. If I am found like this, I will get in trouble, I take care to make sure I never am, replacing the cover carefully, in the same way I fold the tulip’s petals carefully back on themselves in the early spring when I check what colour they will be when they open. I never have been in possession of patience. I think my mother does not know these small, secret things. I am surprised when she asks carefully if I can stop damaging the flowers, although I am sure she’s wrong in the same way I’m sure she’s wrong when she patiently explains to me that number 8s are not formed by putting two identical circles on top of each other and I argue the point in the same way I still argue each point in the same way McEnroe did and immediately became and still remains my favourite tennis player of all time; and ever after 8s will seem off balance to me and I will form them sloppily and incoherently out of long held vengeance even still. When the fronts fall off the speakers, my mother is surprised or acts surprised and says there, they look quite nice like this, don’t they, although I know the real reason for leaving them this way is speakers are expensive and we have no spare money for new ones. Something becomes off with the magic then with the vibrations in plain sight for anyone who cares to look although I never see my sister pressed with her hands against the speakers, or my mother. Years later I fall in love with a man who seems to be doing the same to a small speaker and I come to believe he is privy to the same magic I once was. It takes many more years until I find out he wasn’t, he simply liked the feel of the polished, smooth surface.