Nonfiction
A Weariness Grown Tender: A Time for Love
by N.Y. Haynes
by N.Y. Haynes
This afternoon I decided a nap was needed. As I lounged, feet on the ottoman, I listened. A neighbor just happened to be listening to Marcus Printup, a trumpeter. Closing my eyes, breathing more deeply, I felt through those tracks a depth of feeling, a skill on his instrument and a brilliance of tone. This private creative storm of effort and talent opened a door and invited me in like a friend’s loving arm to lean on and turn my day around.
Listening worked as a strange, powerful lens through which my ordinary daily life was configured and filtered with extraordinary intensity. The notes bleed from his sweet, deep throat—an artist absorbed in the musical task of letting each crescendo develop a full, still life of its own—unlocking the avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of my interior life and of our present time, inundated with unexpressed fear, anger, and sadness.
A Time for Love reconfirmed the knowledge that we, as a nation, were coping exceptionally well with the difficult routine of life with masks and humanity’s devastation. As I embraced the sounds of the accompanying harp in my heart, I remained translucent and calm in the way the notes lingered then reverberated long after the crackle and drag of my weariness had passed.
By six o’clock I had once again come to terms with the extreme necessities of COVID life. Since childhood I have tapped into the wealth of both classical and jazz music. I have fallen in love with the ritualistic nature of the many steps it takes to make each note. I am attracted to the past and haunted by it as well. I often use music that reminds me of another time, or the subtle emotions that might go unnoticed on an “ordinary” day.
A smile danced across my mandible as all the day’s tension flowed out through my toes. A Time For Love was exactly like finding an antique instrument and listening to all the music yet to be played as it reminded me how disaster, when it finally arrives, is never as bad as it seems in expectation.
Listening worked as a strange, powerful lens through which my ordinary daily life was configured and filtered with extraordinary intensity. The notes bleed from his sweet, deep throat—an artist absorbed in the musical task of letting each crescendo develop a full, still life of its own—unlocking the avoidance of the uncomfortable, destructive truths both of my interior life and of our present time, inundated with unexpressed fear, anger, and sadness.
A Time for Love reconfirmed the knowledge that we, as a nation, were coping exceptionally well with the difficult routine of life with masks and humanity’s devastation. As I embraced the sounds of the accompanying harp in my heart, I remained translucent and calm in the way the notes lingered then reverberated long after the crackle and drag of my weariness had passed.
By six o’clock I had once again come to terms with the extreme necessities of COVID life. Since childhood I have tapped into the wealth of both classical and jazz music. I have fallen in love with the ritualistic nature of the many steps it takes to make each note. I am attracted to the past and haunted by it as well. I often use music that reminds me of another time, or the subtle emotions that might go unnoticed on an “ordinary” day.
A smile danced across my mandible as all the day’s tension flowed out through my toes. A Time For Love was exactly like finding an antique instrument and listening to all the music yet to be played as it reminded me how disaster, when it finally arrives, is never as bad as it seems in expectation.
