It's gonna be a long long time
It's gonna be a long long time
There was this song.
It was beautiful and long. The first time she heard it, she was home alone. She listened to it all the way through, lying on her hardwood floor, cheek pressed against the cold, body shivering but completely surrendered to the sound. For the time spent, and the angle of her body, she should have ached and cramped, should have gotten a chill, should have grown restless. But a weak and uncertain horn let out a quietly triumphant noise above a melancholy tune, and the longer she listened, the more she could hear it, and the more it reached into her. And that horn was her. Calling out a victory over God knows what, putting out a single note to let the universe know that she was there, she was apart of it, even when she could hardly hear herself above the noise. And soon, it grew stronger, its tone become fuller, the note richer.
And then the strings swelled. And there was this hopeful sense. Each instrument stepping forward uncertainly, each trying.
And then the drums beat out a victory march.
The movement, for the 22 minute epic was separated into four movements, was called Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. She used to spend her nights laying in the grass of the grounds, eyes lost in the patterns of the stars, body turning cold with the warmth of her cigarette as the last beacon of warmth. And she had lifted her arms skyward to feel the pull of gravity calling them back to her, enjoying the sensation of them resting weightily into her joints. She had never considered the idea of heaven, nor her ability to be an antenna, capable of receiving communication. But she liked the idea anyway. It was a beautiful sentiment in an unsentimental world.
Twelve minutes into the song, and she couldn’t find the horn anymore. The drums and guitars hit a final note and tried to maintain it, and the longer they did, the more it wavered. But it persisted, and grew louder and uglier, resentful in a way that she was ashamed to understand, violently demanding to be listening to, grabbing her ear and whispering harsh words into it, a frantic drumroll beneath it all, trying to reclaim the victorious beat, begging to break, begging to settle, but only growing, maintaining, digging deep into her-
And it gave way to an unhappy and hateful march and it used to be that her eyes would squeeze shut and she’d beg for it to be over, and the slowing of the drums matched her heaving heart and she realized she felt like she needed to gasp for air, and when it was over, the other movements took her back to that place of beauty.
The movement was two parts. The Gathering Storm and Clatters Like Worry. It had always been a confusing, foreign movement, one meant to punctuate the others to bring them into sharper focus and give them deeper meaning. But as she walked through the castle, that hateful march was the beating of her heart. And though she had never considered herself to be a good person, she would have never thought that she understood that movement the way she did. The gathering storm. Clatters like worry.
Nothing had actually happened to her. And none of it was her fault. And yet there was this bubble of rage and guilt caught in her throat, and all she could think was that a cigarette could loosen the tightness in her chest and quiet the cannon balls in her head.
Molly had never been a particularly happy girl, but she had never felt unhappy. She had never felt this.
She wanted to move on to the next movement.
by Molly Weasley Sun Mar 05, 2017 9:41 am
