sing_among_the_stars raze i've decided the daughter of the woman who lives across the street is the trumpet player. she has to be. i don't hear her playing "fly_me_to_the_moon" in the morning anymore. i don't hear her playing anything. she hugs her older brother on the front porch when he's leaving. she pulls him close. she squints because she's trying not to cry. he stands there with his arms at his sides. nothing in his face. he doesn't hug her back. i want to walk across the street and hit him in the back of the head. she sits on a blanket and moves her smile closer to her girlfriend's smile. they kiss. i look away. there's too much tenderness there. too much innocence. i don't want to disturb it. that's their moment. that's their love, young and pure and stunning in its fragility. it's as if neither one of them has ever kissed before and it's a language they're both learning to speak at the same time. her mother has a sign on her front lawn that says, "hate has no place in my house." the sign isn't straight anymore. it's bent back from when someone tried to kick it out of the ground. they couldn't pry it loose from the dirt. they could only bend its spine. and i hope she's the kind of mother that sign tells me she could be. i really do. 210927 ... raze i thought i heard her playing this morning. i thought it was a new song. but it was just someone doing some work on their house, breaking or polishing or chipping away at something with a machine that sounded like a horn until my ears woke up enough to tell me it wasn't any kind of music i wanted to listen to. shit. 211004 ... e_o_i Writing_recently: my main character, 13-year-old Carol, is telling her brother wants the apocalypse to happen in her lifetime - after she's composed a few symphonies. She wants to hear whether the apocalypse angel's seven trumpet blasts sound like the ones in Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. Maybe not, she reasons, since the latter are actually clarinet. 211004 ... e_o_i corrects *is telling her brother she wants 211004 ... raze i heard her playing "god only knows", and i thought, god, she's improved so much. and what a song to learn. but it was only a dream. i should have known. i was far from home, and the trumpet sounded too much like a trombone. 211007 ... raze the sign that dug its heels into the dirt for so long, bowed but determined to stand its ground, is gone. i wonder what lives in that house now. i haven't heard breath move through that horn and sail across the street to meet me in so long, it feels like that music belonged to someone else's life. my instrument is in my chest. fill my heart with song and let me sing forevermore. 220221 what's it to you? who go blather from