Here on this slope, through dark-shadowing doors depleted under the weight of years, she waits. Feeling the rush and tremble of each soul that passes, she offers to the wind of their movements a song of her own, a marriage of the fragile glass air she breaths and the materials of her own self, a flaking pastry that has bubbled and fractured under the heavy afternoons of heat fallen upon this cracked ground. It is a song that’s carried from her branches upon the wind-lines of this mound, along with it lifting the parts of her she gifts to the earth.
His footsteps tap on pavements stones, dancing melodies in ancient patterns drawn upon the soles of his feet. And his handprint, the map of a city that gave birth to him, wrapped in an embrace around the slender neck of his oud. Climbing winding alleys, a tune of solace and fellowship flows from his shoulders, the click and tap of iron upon copper, the bend and stretch of a dancing leg, the soft heartbeat of oud strings caressed by candlelight. And he smiles. Because somewhere, someone joins his tune. An ancient being who knows his old song, one he recognises but has never before sung.
Four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. Autumn is a crystal jar, through which the light of summer continues to shine, but not for long, as it begins to open itself to the winter. Today is the last day of her year. A day written long ago by a lovelorn moon and her friend, the passion-fired sun. An afternoon that is fragile, like the buds of a late jasmine hidden on a rooftop corner nearby. So close to breaking, but for now, it is beautiful.
Upwards over these rooftops she looks, her breath giving rhythm to their patchwork limbs. Knowing what little time she has, she raises her voice higher into the sinking air, joining a chorus of sparrows distracted by plans for the future. And downwards, flowing from her roots, a blood she pumps into the city, its lifeblood.
Her breath is the breath of the city. A city built upon its sounds, of high incantations and of lower groans and tremors, of hard-worn skin against broken-in strings and of metal against stone, metal against metal, cracks, vibrations and trills. The highest of her voices, sung out five times each day from the highest points of the city. A chorus of sacred heartbeats, a heartbeat that unites souls. A heartbeat that binds, like roots to the earth.
Fingers that could touch her sandpaper skin, folded under years of rain and sun, layers upon layers of love spent waiting. These fingers are the ones who offer to her song a pulse in echo of her first heartbeats, and a harmony as sweet as that of the sparrows. Rough skin from practice, a heavenly caress upon silk strings, every touch deeper than the last as they are guided through her song by a heavenly musician who knew them from the womb. Accompanied by the flute, whose heartbroken yearnings speak of loves unrequited and years spent in waiting.
Upon the walls of houses standing longer than the memories of their owners, her inhale and exhale are the weaving of godly seals together in unbreakable union, in and out, an eternal rise and fall of a beautiful but ignorant creation. And the souls who live alongside this beauty, responsible yet ignorant, looking but rarely seeing.
A boy sits upon a tree trunk stool, his feet still tapping from the climb he made to this spot. Oud on his thigh, he begins an embrace, whose song resonates off the thousand corners of the space in which he sits. It is a space, a gap, an opening in the heart of a city whose capillaries wind tighter than a ring on a finger. The work-hardened skin on his palms reaches the lips of the strings, a union of bodies whose melody rings higher than the leaves that reach above his head, from two trees that stand behind him.
He is consumed. Consumed by the song that plays him, that leads and guides him from this space upwards, ascending interlaced with the notes the gentle touch of his hand forms. Gazing upwards, he watches as his song rises, towards a clear blue sky, light with the breathy endings of a year. A heavy set rhythm flows like fresh pressed oil from strings, warm and supple, kneaded and pressed under a loving hand.
As the rise and fall of his notes take shape, transforming from lines to curves and weaving like the geometric seals on the walls of the city’s houses, a wind blows from the north. Sharp and crisp, colder than the sitting air, it catches a whisper of leaves like an oiled flame. Rising higher, a distant harmony becomes a chant, a chorus of thousands, flickering and shivering in the new season’s air. Still looking above him, he recognises the song. The song that came to him as he climbed to this spot, the song of an old friend, one he had known from childhood. Suddenly, he knows.
Finishing the song, he rises. Surrounding the square, a thousand objects are animated by a whistle of life coming from its centre. A tree stands alone. Approaching her, he waits. Waits for her tune to gather, to be invited to her space. Slowly he mounts the ground that surrounds her roots, lifting a hand to her great, heavy-textured trunk. With a touch, he feels a heartbeat. A heartbeat deeper and older, but in time with his own.
It is not just the song that he recognises. Beyond the song, he feels a pulse and a tremble that has accompanied his existence in this city since before his small feet touched its soft earth. A beating and a thumping that measured his dreams, textured his hot days, and its absence, the taste of winter spent waiting for new life.
Her breath becomes a sigh. As the light changes, ushering in a night of new colds, her leaves withdraw from their heavy song to a deeper drone. It is with peace that she feels her heartbeat slow into one of union, a heartbeat shared in a sacred space. One last gust of air, one last breath, she falls, into a new season knowing the last was fulfilled, that waiting was over, that she could sleep.