Page 92 of Sounds Like Love
I bolted upright in bed.
That was it.
Sasha groaned, cracking an eye open. “Bird, what … ? The sheets!” he sleepily slur-cried as I wrapped the bedsheet around myself and dragged it with me, out of the bedroom and into the living room, where an upright piano sat.
I backtracked and grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him with me up to the piano. I slipped onto the bench, wanting to remember that feeling, the spinning, the off-centeredness, the infiniteness of it all, dancing with possibility—or the ghost of it, maybe.
The piano was for decoration—Lily Ashton had taken lessons for a few years—but I flipped the keylid anyway and found the first chord of melody. It wasn’ttooout of tune.
I played the melody—the top line—and a shiver raced down my spine.
“You have that look in your eyes,”he noted, coming to sit down at the bench with me. “Like you’re onto something.”
I found the chords again, a little faster than in our heads, but it felt right.
“Oh,” he murmured, mesmerized.
“You can hear it, can’t you?” I asked.
He nodded, marveling. “Yeah, bird, I can.”
That was all the encouragement necessary. I needed my phone. I needed to record this before I forgot—
Wordlessly, he found it on the coffee table and handed it to me. I turned on the audio recorder, and shuffled for a piece of scrap paper somewhere near the bench, until Sasha disappeared and came back with my notebook from my purse. “Thank you,” I murmured, and flipped to the page I’d scribbled on a few nights ago, and scratched out a word, and wrote another, and I saw it then.
The puzzle pieces coming together.
I sat a little straighter. “Something that sounds like love—rhymes with it,” I clarified. “Dove?Shove?Hereof?”
“Enough?” he suggested.
“That doesn’t rhyme.”
“It’s closeenough.”
I rolled my eyes. “We’ll need coffee—above!”
And a song formed slowly. A song about a cacophony of sound. About a love, sweet and gentle. A meet-cute in motion. A ballad in Technicolor. About finding someone who understood you without asking questions. Someone who was at your side, singing your favorite songs, telling you that you were not alone.
“‘Kiss me in the morning, and keep me in a song. Love me with conversations that take the whole night long,’” I sang, scratching out words, adding others.
Sasha turned himself around on the bench to face the keys. He hummed along with me, repeating the melody, then:“What if—here.”
“Countermelody?” he suggested aloud, playing the notes.
“For the pre-chorus—oh! And then that little bit at the end of the melody? Where it goes up? Highest point of the song. But what if,in the verses, we flip it?” And I played what it would sound like, singing out the notes as I went.
For the next hour, we traded off back and forth, putting in thoughts and suggestions. It was like the lid had finally been unscrewed, and all our ideas came pouring out. I fixed morning coffee while he scrolled through some instrumentations online, and we made notes on a scrap of paper and recorded different melodies for the verses, and as we did, words started to take shape. Ones we just started to gravitate to.
Memoryandmorning,songandlight,nightandlonging, andheartbeatandmotion.
“Secret, secret,” he murmured, jotting it down. “A secret of night—no, notsecret. Something bigger, something—”
Odyssey, I suggested.
“Yes! That. That.”
I hummed, “Love songs set alight. The pounding of a heartbeat …”
