Wednesday 30 May 2007

because quentin asked me to
therefore, if i'm late for dinner - we're supposed to meet at 6, about an hour from now - i shall tell him that it's his fault. i'm quite sure he's a man when he's with amanda, true love makes you do that. but there are times he says things which make me seriously question his - alright let's just say that sometimes he's a really lovely and understanding sister. in fact, he's the only one who photowhores with me! amazing. i shall put up our latest picture soon, if i ever see it again. just like me, we're usually too lazy to do these things.

but before i begin, just now i was doing the ironing and for a moment i wished my brother wasn't quite so big. it's therapeutic running the iron up and down the white expanses of cotton that are his shirts, and it makes me happy to see the wrinkles from the washing disappear. but it really is rather tiring, especially in this energy-sapping heat.

***
monday saw the first time ever i'd watched an evening with friends. i'd sung for the past four years, and it was strange being in the audience and gripping quentin's arm everytime a major seventh sounded perfectly into the wonderfully large space that is the esplanade concert hall. we tried to put what we felt into words, but they wouldn't come that night, and i told him i'd go home and blog about it, so here it is.

i think it'll be different for him, because i continued singing for two years after we left jc. so for me, anyway, the moment came with the chord that sounded in the way you look tonight, i will feel a glow just thinking of you - it was an A13 i believe, or GABDE. the different-est colour of a rather draining night. a night that was really a cold welsh morning eating bacon, sausages and eggs in one of those charmingly stuffy english hotels i'd read about all my life; eating cherries and spitting out the pits directly into a dustbin outside topshop in london, listening to toots thielemans on the harmonica at 17 and feeling tears well up in my eyes for no earthly reason, uniforms, endless rehearsals and laughing in the void deck. a night that was jc all over again, and the magic created those almost four weeks in london, olomouc, wales.

draining because of how pure, innocent and sweet music is. a new colour of all colours - and yet it is, and can only be made by people who are flawed. proud, self-seeking, people who, being people, easily choose all the time not to love, to show un-grace. so i guess we have music to bring us, even for that little while, closer to God and to each other. when we forget that someone else is usually on a totally different wavelength. it doesn't matter, because he sings a G and you sing a D and you've got a perfect fifth, perfect harmony with each other, if only for that instant.

and it was so sad, somehow. because when i was 18 i thought it'd never end, that if i came back and sang some more it'd always be the same. i'm going back to sing tonight knowing that it's different, which is a good thing, but for those two years i thought nothing would ever change. it hurt, rather, seeing how everyone had changed. it would of course have been terribly naive of me to have gone on believing that we'd all stay our 18 year old selves, that we'd all not get sucked up into our own circumstances, our own lives. and so i was terribly naive to believe, essentially, that we'd go on choosing innocence.

monday night was jc all over again and the magic that was those almost four weeks in london, olomouc, wales; it was draining, and sad, somehow, because i couldn't look at people the same way anymore, not after all that's happened, and everything else i've seen. realising how we're all so human and how we're not in harmony any longer.

it was all that i couldn't leave behind, and now i find it's all that i could, and did. music does strange things to you sometimes. maybe we couldn't go on choosing innocence because the innocence we wanted to choose wasn't there any longer.

***
i love the fact that jon can be so annoyingly level headed at times when he's really not. i tried my best to describe how i felt to him at midnight after coming home from the concert and before he even said anything i said, "you're going to tell me to finish eating my grapes in the dark and then just sleep cause i'm tired and tomorrow morning everything will be different."

he was right, of course. and that's why he's my boyfriend (although he's a turtle) and quentin is my lovely sister. i'm going to be so late for dinner.

No comments: