Yoru No Uta
Chapter 1

By: somnambulated
thefreeair@aol.com

And you can tell everybody
this is your song… 

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I’ve always loved her. It was just one of those things, simple as my bedroom ceiling. It was the last thing I saw each night, the first thing to flood into me each morning. It was a part of me, living in my blood and weaving through my thoughts as randomly as each instant I’ve lived through.

Life, I’ve come to believe, is a collaboration of the moments we’ve experienced. Because of my mother, silence does not make me uneasy. Not even if it’s in one of the biggest houses on the street; And because of her I know that there are secrets in everyone, beyond the recluse that seems to linger between parents and their children. Every parent who pays the slightest instances of attention will step back in surprise the first time their child proves to them that they can speak, can form an opinion, can be more than the baby that came from a pre-conceived notion of fantasy. Likewise, every child’s blood will go just the least bit cold to see that their parents can produce tears, can be more than what is expected of them—which, really, is nothing but pleasantries.

I learned much of this from my father. He is a blurry green-eyed smear in my most concentrated memories. He returns to me when I am in an office, or I can smell the ink of the printers in the school computer room. The swishy flashing light of the scanner, photocopy machine. He bought me my first camera when I was four, a white plastic Kodak with a disposable film-reel.

Those are the most tangible things, at least. He is also the thing that makes my mother’s skin pale—he haunts her softly, in the slow-tempo songs. He’s a star in her eye, melting down to a single tear that she never thinks I catch. He’s gone now, though he’s made us who we are, and has taught me many things. Because of him, I’m an Observationalist; I’ve learned more through simply watching, being, breathing the air, than I have through asking questions. 

And then there’s her. 

Because of her, I’m a poet. More words come to me while I’m looking at her face, her hair, her eyes (like the sun through bright green treetops) than anywhere else. I’ve learned the soft cool touch of another girl, the palm of her hand like a mid-afternoon breeze we could walk through on our way home from school. Because of her, I gather myself each night to the language of the unsaid. Because of her, I have learned how strange, how very silent love can be. 

We are nothing if we are not the moments we’ve lived. If not for the time I’ve spent with her, I cannot guarantee I would even be a person I would have liked. Perhaps the desire to cling to detail—my father’s trait—would have dissolved without such a fascination, asphyxiation. And the silence taught by my mother would have gone cold and turned to loneliness. The things I know, the things I love, would be gray ghosts suspended in the dark hallways that lead to the rooms my mother and I never use now.

I faced my ceiling every night with no aspirations. I was happy to linger, to evolve beside her. She was a part of me, of course. Like all other things that undertook my nature, I’d never dreamed of making her entirely my own (though, yes, I’d have loved if she asked me to.) But I hadn’t ever imagined how drastically my thoughts, my life could change if, instead of my ceiling, the last thing I saw was her sleeping face. I hadn’t ever imagined how warm the rest of her skin could be beyond her cool hands. And never did I let myself think—even if only for the span of a night’s short moment—that she could love me too…