He'd heard it from the third floor, from the room of his club's office, and the windows had been closed, smothering the music to just a rumbling muffle that ruffled his mood. But, he'd decided to open the window and see: it was a nice day--sunny, clear, and clement--and he'd wanted to hear. And the office's atmosphere could use some musical accompaniment. So, he'd opened it, and the music flooded the room like water, and, like a sudden stream, it took him aback as his ears were flooded with the full, unfettered fluidity of the ditties they played, with their wonderful blunders, and the melodic mumble of the community of humanity. It made him wanna look outside.
And he did.
He stuck his head outside the window and looked down, savoring the omnipotent, panoramic view of the beautiful square below him: decorative strings strewn about the walls, balloons leashed onto walls and tables, tables set in a row, with cookies, doughnuts, pretzels, milk, and soda, easels propping the paintings of art students, people standing or moving about, some of which he knew. And then there was the band, settled in a corner--an electric piano, a guitar, a bass, a xylophone, and those wind chimey things, the name of which escaped his mind--all in the corner, with a few people he knew behind some of them and the conductor in front of them, all of them making music, the rocking waves of which ricocheted off all the four walls to envelop and embrace the atmosphere in sheer beauty. It all made him think to himself:
This must be the feeling God feels.
This must be the feeling God feels, sometimes, when He looks down from this omnipotent, panoramic view, witnessing this atom of humanity burst with activity and celebrate creativity, and the heat of the sun must be the warmth of his heart, the clouds in the skies being tears in his eyes. The warmth and waters that kept a cold, arid world breathing day by day. That’s certainly how he felt. But he felt his heart sink with alienation when the waves didn’t reach out for him in his third-story window--from this insolated valance, like what Pluto must be to the sun. He wanted to be swept away in the wave.
“Sounds good, doesn’t it?”
His moderator. He didn‘t turn around. “It does.”
“It’s a nice day out, too.”
“Yeah.”
He heard her walking towards him and she stood beside him, looking out at the atom. She shared his bliss in the sight and they just stood and watched for awhile. Then, he thought: today’s no day for a club--not logically and not righteously.
So, he started: “Can I--”
“Sure.” She chuckled. “Nobody’s gonna come, anyway. Mustn’t have anything to give in. Unless,” she looked a him, “you’ve got something.”
“I gave in mine, already.”
“All right,” she looked back out. “You can go.”
He felt his heart simply jump out the window and start to dance with the music, but he just smiled and came back inside, glancing at her, and said “Thanks”, and he went for the table.
“No problem,” she said as he flung his back over his shoulder. “Who knows: maybe you can do an article on this if it’s big enough.”
He looked at her, then out the window, and smiled. “I’d like that.” Soon, he found himself just staring, though, and looked at her, bidding her goodbye, and he left.
He walked down the deserted hallways, lonely with only the music as company. He'd heard it all throughout, too: the diameter of the school was that small and the music was that loud--loud enough to let the waves shake this square-shaped school from that festive epicenter. And it pulled his soul like the moon pulls water--pulled him all the way to the other side of the school and down to the first floor until he stood before the opened doors of the courtyard, outstretched to him like a pair of welcoming arms waiting to hug him into heaven.
He walked in and was hugged by the arms of God, letting the warmth of it wash over his soul and letting the music rock it gently like the ebb and flow the ocean, the beautiful Babel of the community of humanity being music all on its own, composed by none other than the Creator.
He just stood where he had entered--near the wall--and looked. His consciousness had been blowing about like a feather in the wind of this world, and he'd forgotten he was a but part of it--having disassociated the sense of sensation from his body to become an impalpable body of some supernatural world, almost as if he was the music. It's what happened when he became lost in thought. It took a tap on his shoulder to stop his flight and he looked at the person over there:
His poetry club moderator. Smiling. "Hey, Art."
He smiled back. "Hey."
She chuckled. "I think you left your body."
He thought he did, too, but he frowned a little.
"I called at your name but you were just gazing off, smiling dreamily or something."
"Oh."
She smiled. A beautiful, bright smile. "You must really be into this."
He glanced out to the courtyard--food, music, paintings, and people--and he smiled a slight but bright smile. "I am."
She kept smiling upon the dreamy gleam in his beaming eyes and let out a slight laugh. "I wish everyone were as--aesthetic as you."
He didn't know she'd spoken to her for a few seconds until he nodded and said "Yeah."
"Maybe more people would be here," she laughed slightly again.
He hmm'ed a half-observational, half-dismissive “Hmm”. He hadn't noticed. And, now
that he had, he didn't care, so he shrugged. "We're here,” he said, letting his eyes behold the beauty of
everything before looking back at her. “’s all that matters, I guess.”
She just looked at him in amazed musing and nodded her head, a smile passing over her face like a breeze that blows a cloudy day away. “You’re right.”
He was glad someone said that. It let him know he wasn't crazy or autistic or something for staring off time and again for eternities at a time. His being was just beyond his body: it was the serene oceans in the eyes of a girl, or the leaves of a tree, or the stars in the sky, or the feather in the wind. Anything it wanted to be. Such was the limitless malleability of his incorporeal mind.
He felt something on his wrist and the warmth of it made his cold, nomadic consciousness shiver in shock as he looked at it. A hand. That hand. That hand with that pleasant palm and those graceful fingers hugging his wrist, imparting upon it a wonderful warmth. His eyes trailed the slender arm and the soft shoulder to which that hand was attached until he finally dared to look at her face and melt into a pool of perspiration at the beam of its eyes--those serene oceans--and the beauty of its smile.
"Dance with me!" she said, pulling his arm with her as she walked toward the band. The weightless mesh of love that he now was could only float behind her, and what little intellect he had left turned his head around and waved goodbye to his moderator, and she waved a goodbye back between her laughs.
His head looked forward again and looked at her hair (the back of her head, really)--blowing in a breeze of its own. "I can't dance."
She looked back at him with that smile. "I don't care."
He stared at the lovely sheen the sun shone on her sweat-slicked face and how some stray strands of that silk were splayed upon it, but stopped himself. "But--you know I can't."
"It's okay."
He heard the dirge to which he'd be doing whatever-could-be-called-dancing to. Something upbeat. Sort of fast. Just sort of. Yet, too fast for his feet to follow, he thought. Too fast. It was an intoxicant that sped up the processes of his life: the beat of his heart, the steps of his feet, the activity of the world around him. Everything. In a blur, he'd been taken to a spot just a few feet from the piano, where many people he knew had been gathered around in a crowd, greeting him when they saw him, and he nodded a general acknowledgement, and before he knew it, he was dancing.
And he danced.
Or he thought he did, anyway. He didn't know. He didn't care. The music severed all self-consciousness from his conscious, and he let it become one with the wave, riding it wherever it would take him. He trusted it. He guessed it was trustworthy, too, because everyone else smiled all throughout and she smiled all throughout. And he did, too. And, in a blasphemous blur, it was over, and there was an applause. He was too upset to react to it. He never thought he'd be angry at the ending of a dance. But he was; he wanted to dance more. And he wanted to ask. She said she needed a drink, though, and he watched her float away.
He sighed some ruffled wind out of his soul and felt infinitely lighter. Light enough to surpass the gravity and float. Like a feather. It felt good. And it felt good because it was a feeling and not a fantasy. He felt it and didn't think it and in feeling it he truly was it. He was a feather. A feather flying with the breath of God.
He smiled and floated away as well.
He floated to the tables to talk with her a little and they talked as she drank a can of ice tea. He didn't know what made him do that. It wasn't something he would've usually done but he figured a feather will fly where the wind will glide, and, at the moment, he felt like gliding to all the plateaus that would've usually been unreachable with the weight of worry shoved deep inside his soul by gravity. He was glad he did it, too, because it was a good talk, and she had waved inside to a teacher who had looked outside from a first-floor window. He smiled at that: a bit of affection from the heart of humanity. Yet he felt a slight pity for the paper-weighted teacher inside that window. He knew what it was inside a window, when mere centimeters secludes someone from the warmth of the world. And he almost was lost in that thought until she tapped him and said she'd be right back.
So he had a cookie, wandered about, and talked to a few more people until he saw a painting and observed it and the others, not really looking into them, but out of them, being a window into another world of their own--the window in the world of someone's mind. A palpable portal to another place, so ethereal yet real he felt he could put his hand through. And that's what he did. He put his hand through and felt the feelings and groped the creativity for some truth. Sometimes he grasped it. Sometimes another hand pulled him in deeper. But it always enlightened his hand with the spark of imagination, bestowing it with a warmth that could touch the world and all its disheartened hearts. It made him look up and smile at the Eye in the Sky, watching over this heart of humanity, bathing it in its love, and he thanked it for the freedom and the infinite mental capacity to do things such as this: to stand in a square with grass and trees and to listen to music and to dance and to look at art to and be a living, breathing work of art, himself, with to ability to do anything.
His heart felt a sudden absence, though. That's because his ears were no longer singing to it, and that's because there were no more songs playing and there was a longer-than-usual pause of silence when they went from one song to another. He looked at the band and saw just a stand where the piano should've been and saw the guitar tucked away into its case and saw a long limousine of a cart on which the bass was already sitting.
His heart dropped and all the warmth he'd been enveloped in vanished as his feet were anchored to the ground once more by gravity with the weight of worry, and, after looking at his watch and seeing a mere "3:35", he went up to a friend and asked what was going on.
"Uh--" he glanced at the door, from which a few people were leaving, looked at the instruments, and looked back at him. "It's over."
He frowned. "Already?"
"Too little people are here."
He looked around and saw the popped atom of humanity--the buoyant bubble of blithe and beauty--rapidly deflate with the haste of some frivolity he damned in his heart. "But," he looked back at him, "it wasn't scheduled to end until five."
He shrugged. "It's five, then."
He glared at him. "But it isn't."
"To them, it is."
He glared about him and also saw a few picture-less easels. The desertion. The abandonment.
"Just pretend like it's five," he said with a pat on his back and walked away, and he was left alone on a speck of an island of isolation while the ocean drained about him. And, soon, only a few people were left. Four. Including himself. Only three people left around him.
He just stood for awhile. He didn't know how long but, the next thing he knew, he felt a hand on his shoulder and he looked over it, seeing her, again.
"Are you okay?"
He thought on that. "Why?"
"I called you three times but you didn't answer."
He looked around. "Yeah."
She was silent a bit, and when the feeling of her hand on his shoulder sunk beneath the solid shell of solitude that he'd shed again, his body tensed until it slid off.
"I was gonna ask." Pause. "Is it over?"
He smiled an acidic smile. "Yep."
"But--it's only about 3:30 or something."
He looked at his watch. "3:39."
"Wasn't it gonna end at five?"
He laughed a little. "It is five."
"But it isn't."
He shrugged. "Just pretend."
She didn't say anything. It was that way for awhile.
"Are you coming?"
"In a bit." He jerked his head. "Just go on."
She didn't. Not right then and there. She just stood there for awhile and, just with that alone, it was as if he could feel her hand on his shoulder again and he could feel his body tense again until she slid off, walked away, and left him to the abysmal, soulless silence.
He hated the silence.
It was the silence of solitude, of lifelessness, of nothingness. It was the silence of death; the eternal requiem. It swallowed his ears, which swallowed his heart, having been gnawed raw in the jaw of dereliction and falling down a bottomless esophagus to just float in the vacuous abyss of death. His heart was a baby without its lullabies, and his ears were departed parents. The result was nothing but this shell of solitude in which his cold, nomadic consciousness roamed, just dreaming of defying gravity--of being a feather in the wind--and when he looked around, he felt that: the void where the band had been, where the easels and tables had stood, where the people were communicating, and the music to make it all the more beautiful. They were all gone, leaving behind the decorations like fossils. And it was just the grass, the trees, breeze, the Eye, and him, and he looked up at the Eye. It all made him think to himself:
This must be the feeling God feels.