02
ThE MUSIC BENEATH EVERYTHING
There are moments when the body remembers something long before the mind does.
It happened somewhere between the first mailbox and the second.
The melody drifting from my pocket had grown just loud enough to distinguish itself from the afternoon. A fiddle. A lazy rhythm. A voice worn smooth by gravel roads and long drives with the windows down. I couldn't remember pressing play, only that the music seemed less like something coming from my phone than something the neighborhood had decided to hum.
Luna's ears twitched.
Mine did too.
The song settled into the rhythm of our footsteps until I could no longer tell whether I was walking to it or whether it had quietly adjusted itself to match my pace.
My right shoulder swayed.
Then the left.
So slightly it could have been mistaken for the movement of someone avoiding a crack in the sidewalk.
I smiled.
Not because I meant to.
Because somewhere beneath years of practiced restraint, something recognized itself.
Luna glanced back.
She had an uncanny way of looking at me that made it seem as though she wasn't checking where I was, only whether I had finally arrived.
Her eyes lingered for half a heartbeat before she continued down the sidewalk.
Confident.
Certain.
As though she knew something waiting farther ahead.
The breeze shifted.
Until that moment I hadn't realized the air had been still.
Now it wandered lazily through the branches above us, setting thousands of leaves into motion all at once. The sound wasn't a rustling so much as a whisper traveling from tree to tree, each oak passing the same secret to the next until the entire street seemed to breathe together.
Sunlight slipped between the moving leaves.
The sidewalk brightened.
Darkened.
Brightened again.
It reminded me of standing beneath the surface of a swimming pool as a child, watching light ripple across the bottom in slow-moving patterns that never repeated themselves.
I had forgotten how alive shadows were.
Most people think of shadows as the absence of light.
Standing there, they felt more like its dance partner.
A mockingbird landed on the mailbox ahead of us.
Its song poured into the afternoon with astonishing confidence, filling silence rather than interrupting it.
Luna stopped.
Not because she had been distracted.
Because she had noticed.
She sat quietly, ears lifted toward the bird as though listening to an old friend finish a story.
I found myself doing the same.
The bird sang.
The wind answered.
Somewhere farther away another bird replied.
Then another.
Soon the entire neighborhood seemed stitched together by conversations no human had been invited into.
Or perhaps...
we had always been invited.
We had simply forgotten to listen.
Without thinking, my fingers tapped softly against my thigh.
One.
Two.
Three.
The rhythm spread upward into my elbow.
My shoulders loosened.
The music in my pocket grew brighter, and before I realized what I was doing, my steps had begun falling somewhere between walking and dancing.
Nothing dramatic.
Only enough that each stride carried a little less weight than the one before it.
Luna noticed first.
She bounded forward with exaggerated enthusiasm, her front paws lifting higher than necessary, her tail describing impossible circles behind her.
I laughed.
This time it came easier.
She responded by hopping sideways as though laughter itself were contagious.
"You're ridiculous," I said.
She sneezed.
Then continued walking with complete dignity.
I laughed harder.
The sound startled a pair of mourning doves from the grass.
They lifted into the sky together, wings beating softly against the warm afternoon before disappearing above the trees.
For a moment I watched them climb.
There had been a time when I would have looked back down almost immediately.
Now I kept watching until they became impossible to separate from the blue.
How many beautiful things, I wondered, had disappeared simply because I hadn't stayed with them long enough?
The question arrived without demanding an answer.
That was new.
Questions usually came carrying urgency.
This one came carrying curiosity.
The song reached its chorus.
My body answered before I could.
A slight bounce entered my step.
Then another.
My shoulders moved more freely now, my arms swinging with a rhythm they hadn't known in years.
I caught my reflection in the dark window of a parked truck.
For an instant I almost didn't recognize the man smiling back.
Not because he looked different.
Because he looked lighter.
The expression belonged to someone I hadn't seen in a long time.
Someone who had once believed joy required no permission.
The breeze returned.
Warmer this time.
It wrapped itself around us before drifting farther down the street, and the leaves followed after it in gentle applause.
Luna suddenly broke into an awkward, joyful hop, all four paws leaving the sidewalk at once before she landed clumsily and looked around as though hoping no one had noticed.
I stopped walking.
Then, without thinking...
I copied her.
One hop.
Then another.
It felt absurd.
Beautifully, wonderfully absurd.
There was no audience.
No one watching from behind curtains.
No passing cars.
Only the trees.
The birds.
The long afternoon.
And one delighted dog who looked at me as though I had finally remembered the rules.
We continued down the sidewalk together, not quite walking anymore.
Not quite dancing either.
Something in between.
The kind of movement that belongs only to children...
and to adults who have, if only for a moment, forgotten they are supposed to be adults.
Ahead of us, the road curved gently out of sight beneath a canopy of ancient oaks.
The light beyond the bend looked different somehow.
Softer.
Almost luminous.
Luna quickened her pace.
For the first time since leaving the house...
I let her lead.