jesse spends the spring night strum-strum-strumming away on his ukelele. he’s delegated himself to the balcony of their new apartment, curled on a folding chair, where the sound is eaten by the outside air before it can travel too far.
these past few days, he’s been practicing nonstop with a single-minded determination. he supposes it’s his new thing, like the one summer he’d spent obsessively learning 3d modeling. he had gotten pretty far with that one, and had brought it all the way to university with him, where his thing had branched out and mutated with all the new stimuli. korea university gave him a plethora of new tools: stuff for woodworking, physical model-making, drawing—he spent a good amount of time on each pursuit before, inevitably, football would always take over.
football was his baseline. when he stayed up through the night hammering hinges onto his hand-carved music box, he suffered the next day at practice—enough that once his coach pulled him aside after his drills to give him a stern speech. don’t squander your potential, he said. keep your grades up but stay focused. focus meant shelving his music box before he could cover it with varnish, abandoning his perspective skyscraper drawings, and it meant his paper-mache taj mahal replica would be indefinitely missing a plinth.
but his game would always be good. his kicks would always be precise, his positioning immaculate. football was his One True Thing, you could say, and he abandoned everything else for it eventually.
sitting on the balcony alone, his thoughts wander back to all of the half-realized pursuits he’s left in his wake. jesse strums another few chords, playing the first verse of counting stars. the lyrics half-form in his mouth, consonants swallowed up into idle hums mostly just to keep the tempo. jesse hasn’t had a new thing for a while until now. he realized it only these past few days when he felt it toeing the line of excessive, the stupid ukelele pushing in between all the gaps of his normal daily routine and sometimes disrupting it. maybe that one doctor back in korea, the one who’d screened him for the big A, would have some sort of psychological explanation for his sudden unshakeable focus on learning how to play. not that jesse really gives a fuck.
who he does care about is his saint of a girlfriend, who’s been tolerating it—said she liked it, even. but jesse doesn’t know how long that patience is going to last, and even still he houses a small self-conscious fear of pushing it too far. to like something so much so openly is a type of vulnerability, maybe, even if it’s something as inconsequential and silly as the ukelele.
jesse is pretty sure it won’t mess with his football, at least. there’s too much riding on that now. he can feel it in the tensed line of his muscles every time he goes to practice, a pressure on his back with his fiancée’s health things and their financials taking a hit with the move. jesse feels like he still hasn’t yet fallen into his place in italy. a puzzle piece that still needs to be pushed and finagled into its hole, one that doesn’t seem quite right. he worries his new life will slip away between his fingers like sand—it seems scarily easy to let it. a few too many bad plays and maybe his management will reevaluate his worth in the team, revisit his signing, or maybe the sea will swallow him up if he wades too far in; maybe his sweat-soaked nightmares will all come true.
he strums through another hesitant verse from counting stars. for a moment, jesse lets himself feel good about the fact he’s already memorized the finger placements for them. he smiles faintly. the song is fitting for the kind of night sky that messina gives them, clear and chock-full of stars past the flowering trellises. he keeps his eyes up for a minute longer, playing c majors gently enough that they dissipate before they travel too far, contained inside his tiny bubble on the balcony.
then he yawns, putting his bruise-mottled football player legs down. tomorrow is early morning training and a full afternoon of field practice. he has begun to write his schedules down in cramped little lists, alongside new italian phrases he’s learned—il cartellino giallo, for one, yellow card—so tonight, jesse spends only a moment more outside. then, he turns around and slides the glass door open, making the short trek to their bedroom, placing his ukelele by the corner.
as quiet as he tries to be, his weight still makes the mattress creak.
