Hello! This is Alexis. I am here after a long absence to post an excerpt of a story I’m working on. Actually, no, I am not working on this story. For the past few months, I haven’t written anything with a definite structure. I just thought about this and decided it write and post. I wrote this around May 2021. So here it is. Enjoy reading or butchering it in whatever way it brings you entertainment.

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They were born in the same year. When she saw expiration dates, she would calculate how old they’d be then. Whether they would still be together, she was apprehensive about the possibility of solitude yet toyed with the thought. 

They lived where foot traffic was rare enough to make them feel they were alone yet accessible enough for when they needed supplies. The unit’s size was comfortable. He would make music inside the small studio he requested – his only condition. The speakers replayed the same fragment for hours, never leaving a note unturned until it reached perfection. It never did, for his ears at least. He had moments of an overflow of gratitude for Lourdes. He expressed it with a kiss, more innocent than passionate. She would reciprocate, of course. They were silent most of the time, each working on their craft. She wrote about worlds they could never live in while he captured this one through music. 

Stasis in a confined space, even with someone she found comfort in, was not for her. She read to feel the world and wrote to navigate around it. They watched movies in the evening, mindless ones. He would analyze the soundtrack and take notes on what he found useful. She’d lean on his shoulder, and he would let her despite the slight joint pain that was getting worse. 

It was the same way that she endured her knees and went up to the attic to bring his morning coffee and afternoon tea. The comfort made her feel guilty, and their craft was their only contribution. He told her that they worked their way through their own set of difficulties in their youth. She felt that the young were throwing their lives so the elderly and weak could live in peace. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Does time add value to life? It was her empathy that he adored the most about her. He made melodies from that, music that gave warmth to movies. It filled the viewers’ ears with the things he thought he felt. They spent their youth running away from this. Every time either opened their mouth to speak would end up in an argument – an attack against the other’s principles. He can’t fix her. No one can. He is not her project to work her life around. It took decades of separation to figure out that it was silence that would keep them together. 

He composed melodies from her voice. How she spoke in certain situations, the subtle changes in tone would trigger a symphony. He translated and amplified these cues and created twenty years’ worth of music solely from her voice. She never wrote about him, possibly the nearest being how he made her feel, the uncertainty of his actions, and how she spiraled them to the worse possible interpretation. They understood each other but didn’t have the patience to figure out the language that didn’t exist in the other’s world. There were lucky moments, thoughts, ideas that slipped through and went directly to the part that didn’t need conversion to words. It went where it needed to be.