WHISPER AND SYMPHONY by Bethany Hagen
It starts with something small. A whisper, at first, a ghost of a word.
You start when you hear it, turning your head to see who whispered in your ear, but there’s no one there. You’re the only one in the room, save for the makeup artist in front you of who’s currently digging a fresh mascara wand out of her apron.
It comes again, clearer this time, but you are staring at her and her mouth doesn’t move. And then your mother–who is also your manager–strides into the room and it’s time for the concert and you don’t think about it anymore.
It gets bigger, it grows, and you realize after the first few days that even though you’re hearing things, you’re not really hearing things–the things are coming from inside your head. Long strings of words often unconnected by prepositions or articles or logic–that brat stupid entitled Disney pop star such a brat or she looks tired today so tired drinking maybe drugs she ate too much last month. The things you hear about yourself–ugly words about the color of your skin, cruel words about your weight, worried words about every single performance you give and interview you do and photo you take.
Schizophrenia, you think. You read someone’s post about it once. Schizophrenia can be voices. Delusions. Paranoia.
But as the days go by, you grow less convinced. Because it’s not just words, it’s images and memories and sights and smells and tastes. It’s not just about you–it’s your mom worrying if your stepfather is cheating on her, it’s your assistant fretting about her student loans, it’s your publicist thinking incessantly about the upcoming election. When you are alone, your mind becomes quiet, a garden of your own thoughts and no one else’s. But the moment your mother or agent walks through the door, it begins. The onslaught. The noise. The invasion.
Only one thing stops it, save isolation.
When you sing, your mind is as quiet as it is when you’re alone. When you sing, you only hear yourself, taste your own tastes and think your own thoughts. And so you sing constantly to yourself when you’re offstage. You hum, you tap your fingers and snap your fingers and clap clap clap your fingers to ward off the noise. People begin to think you’re strange, you’re cracking under the pressure of teen pop princess celebrity fame, and you can’t just come out and tell them that you can hear thoughts, but they leave you alone because you are singing better than ever, your fans are more in love with your voice than ever, and you are making them more money than ever.
You accept that this is your life now. That the only peace from madness is in music or loneliness and so you decide to emphatically embrace both.
That’s the day you meet Rian.
Rian is not famous. Rian is not a singer or a songwriter or any kind of artist, and nor is she any sort of hanger-on. She’s an engineering student at UCLA and she doesn’t even have Instagram on her phone. She doesn’t want money or fame.
You meet at a coffee shop, you hurrying out with your big purse and big sunglasses and big plastic cup with its big green straw, her wearing a bow tie and suspenders with short blue hair. You bump into each other, and you stop humming momentarily and you hear them–her thoughts.
beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
You can taste that she wants to kiss you, feel that she wants to hold your hand, and the moment her hand touches your elbow to steady you, you hear something else.
Not from you, but from her. It’s a deep slow song that muffles the psychic noise of the coffee shop, dampening everything around you so that all you hear is the glowing song of her blood chorusing through her body and her heart singing along, leading the music.
You fall in love holding an iced caramel macchiato in your hand.
Pop princesses are not supposed to fall in love with other girls, especially girls like Rian, but you don’t care. You don’t care which parts Rian was born with or what name her parents wrote on her birth certificate. You care that Rian draws circles on your back at night when you can’t sleep, that she steals you away from your handlers to take you on long desert hikes, you care that when Rian is next to you, the serene music of her warm and open heart drives away all the noise and ugliness of the outside world.
You still sing all the time, hum often, but now because you’re happy…not because you’re haunted.
There’s more though. More than that. Three months after you meet, you and Rian are sitting on a blanket in the desert, watching stars shoot across the sky. You hold hands, fingers laced and palms pressed together, and it’s quiet, so quiet, that you realize you can hear something more than Rian’s music.
Not like you’re singing or humming or tapping your fingers to make a rhythm of defense. But like you’re finally happy and healthy enough to hear your own pulse, your own blood singing. It was so hard to hear before–over the noise of cameras and chattering assistants and glad-handing producers and frenzied fans. But now you realize that it was there all along, waiting for you to hear it, waiting for you to let your own strength drown out the noise of the world.
You take a deep breath, reaching into yourself, and exhale, squeezing Rian’s hand as you do. The music is loud now, and glorious, rolling out over the desert hills and down to the city below. Together your bodies sing, making you strong, but the greatest gift this amazing girl has given you is your own song, the song of your own body and your own mind, which will sing even when you are apart from her.
It starts with something small. A whisper.
discoholicmusic
snowghoul
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
stormborns
amandla
tangentwithtanner
titsay
