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Description
When she puts the headphones on, her body turns into a cathedral.

The music resonates in her chest and echoes in the dome of her skull, flushing under her skin and running through her bones. She breathes it into her lungs and it sings in her blood like oxygen. The music flows into her empty spaces, fills her out and makes her feel whole.

Only then is she human. Only then does she feel like herself.

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Essie woke up to the smell of pancakes. Her mother was making breakfast downstairs.

“Morning,” she said cheerily in the grey light.

“Morning.” Essie started to dig into her pancakes, but stopped short. Her mother had forgotten to put sugar in them, and they tasted like flour. When asked how they were, Essie smiled and said they were excellent.

Her mother dropped her off at school with a kiss on the cheek; Essie could feel her anxious eyes as she walked up the steps. She went to Biology, where a girl named Hannah chatted about movies and waited patiently as Essie struggled to keep up with her banter. When she dug into her backpack for her binder she found that her mother had slipped in a bag of cookies with a note.

“You seemed down at breakfast,” it read. “Hope this cheers you up! Love, Mom.”

Hannah looked over her shoulder. “Your mom’s pretty sweet,” she laughed.

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A soft touch of the piano and the voice lifts her heart. Her soul hums and sways with the melody, her mind with the poetry of the words. It’s steady yet soaring, soft yet powerful, kind yet vindictive, and when the beat comes in she feels alive.

She takes in the bleakness of the day and releases it as colour. It hides no truths, holds her to no standards. She’s in her own sphere, alone with the music.

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In English they watched a film about the war in the Middle East. Young men wrapped in checkered headscarves hoisted weaponry under a BBC-accented voiceover. Half the class was asleep; they’d all seen this before. The room was dark, and light from the screen played across their slumbering faces.

Fresh poison each week...

Onscreen, an IED exploded. Blood hit the dust, and Iraqi children wept in the streets. Beside her, Hannah was pale-faced and looked like she might be ill. Essie reached out under the table and clasped her hand. She squeezed back and they stayed like that for the rest of the film, Hannah turned away from the screen with her head in her hand.

When it was over Hannah removed her hand and wouldn’t look her in the eyes. The teacher came around and handed back an essay assignment.

“Interesting ideas, but not quite the ones I was looking for,” the comments read. “Next time, try incorporating more of the required elements from the rubric.”

Essie looked up. The boy in front of her was listening to Billy Jean on his iPod; she could tell by the drumming of his fingers.

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If I’m a pagan of the good times...

The music swells, a relentless rise and release of the backing vocals and guitar. The voice wheels above, painful and passionate. It rips at the world below and sows it with anger and tears, and she feels it tremble beneath her.

---

Her mother hid the pills and the bills behind the bottles of wine because she thought she wouldn’t touch them. Essie didn’t, but she saw them every time she considered it, staring into the cupboard above the microwave, trying not to see the papers tucked behind the Merlot.

She quickly closed the cupboard at the click of her mother’s keys at the front door. Her mother whisked in, smiling and rosy-cheeked with a small bag of sugar under her arm.

“How was school, dear?” she asked. “Work was...well, work, but you look like you had a good day. I just stopped by the supermarket to buy some sugar; we’d run out, could you believe it?”

Why did parents hide things? Essie’s mother hung up her coat, chatting brightly about the job she’d been fired from three weeks ago.

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Music is her lover and her friend. Sometimes it’s a grey-eyed she, fresh and tempestuous. She’s the giggle at the funeral, she knows everybody’s disapproving looks, she wears a purple knit sweater scattered with tiny white lilies and dances rather than walks. Sometimes it is a soft-voiced he, who closes his eyes and asks her to listen to the silence between every heartbeat. Sometimes it’s everything at once.

We were born sick, heard them say it.

Together they press their ears to the earth and feel its rumbling. They drum against their hips as they wander down the sidewalk. They climb up skyscrapers and set their souls on fire.

I was born sick, but I love it.

They hurt on the inside. There is a loneliness that aches within them, a beautiful sadness that blooms like a flower. They are different from the rest, but they embrace it together as they sing under the moon like they’re heaven’s last true mouthpiece.

---

“Essie, maybe you should see a therapist.”

“I don’t need to.”

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It’s soft, sweet and heartbreakingly sad. The voice cracks and cries and the choir gently consoles, as the piano rises to resonate at heady heights before the song gives one last rush.

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“Essie –”

“Mum, I’m okay. But...maybe you should.”

---

Essie entered the house and realized her mother was home early. She could see her sitting at the kitchen table with her back to her. She hadn’t heard her come in. Essie quietly closed the door behind her and tiptoed forward. Her mother’s shoulders were shaking. She was crying. There was a glass of wine beside her.

Essie took deep breaths as she watched her mother. Her hands were quivering, and she felt like crying too. She turned. The door was behind her. She could leave. She could just go.

She could leave right now.

She reached out. She touched the doorknob, and gripped it. She stood there for a moment in silence. Then she turned back around and went up to her room.

Essie plugged in her speakers, and opened the door.