This Is Our Music Now

Listening to music utilizes your whole brain. I’d read that in an article once. We didn’t have music anymore.

The world we live in now is different. Worse. And not just because we don’t have music. That was just a symptom of everything else.

I’m sure others, those with musical talent, have ways of keeping it in their lives. But my wife and I are both inept, to say the least. I used to think I could sing a little, when I had a steering wheel to sing to. Everyone can sing when it’s to the radio, my aunt would always say.

There are no radios anymore.

My wife — and I say this with the deepest love — is unilaterally tone deaf. Even her humming is bad.

So there is no music for us out here, in our cabin with no power on an island in a lake. It’s just the soft utterings of two women who are unsure of where life goes from here, though we never talk about that.

We don’t talk about much, to be honest. And when we do, it’s about mundane things.

Are the tomatoes okay?

Yeah.

The corn seems to be shooting up, too.

I hope the rabbits stay out.

I love you.

I know.

Sara?

I’m gonna go fishing.

It’s hard to talk about love these days. Or happy things. How can we, when we know we’re lucky to be here. We don’t feel lucky. We feel guilty. We have a haven. We have each other. But we feel the burden of everyone who doesn’t have those things. Of everyone who lost everything — homes, loved ones, lives — when the country went to shit.

Dopamine. That was another product of listening to music, the article had said. We could both use some dopamine. Some music.

Sara, wait. Let me come with you.

You never go fishing with me, she thinks. It’s true. I don’t like touching fish. But she doesn’t say it out loud. I just read it on her face. She always had a face like a marquee. Even here, where our expressions are permanently tired. But she waited.

The fishing rod feels foreign in my hand, like a sword, maybe, or any other phallic object, for that matter. They never really were for me.

We sit in silence on the shore on a part of the island that sticks out, bulging out like a hernia. Not quite a peninsula, though. The water is deeper here, the fish bigger. Sara always fishes here when she doesn’t feel like paddling out in the canoe.

Around us, the crickets chirp, the frogs ribbit, the water laps near our feet. The birds sing their evening songs. An orchestra without a conductor, each musician on their own page.

Sara, listen.

What now?

Just listen.

And so we do. How had we never heard it like this before? We must not have been ready. But now we let our ears open as the island sings its song. And for the first time in what feels like a hundred lifetimes, we smile.

This is our music now.