Satting in Peaceful Havoc

Concentration is a fickle thing. Even as the paper hurled expletives in the forms of quadratic grammar and antonyms of x, I was listening to the bard near my earlobe, on the pirate’s booty that speared me.  Oh, as he sang, the beat-boxing lute was fanfared about, perfectly piano with his high-pitched bass hymn. My fingers made crotchets, yet to be skewered, which danced on the same intervals of less crucial semibreves in a draft symphony.

A female voice burst into a new melody, one that was carefully shocked into my ears from a small black box. And in this cacophony, I found my mind more focused, like a complete jigsaw puzzle. A mechanical one, probably, or a feline one, for it whirred and purred contently.

I heard your voice too. High and nervous, tweaked by the wrench of nationality and broken momentarily by what sounded like sniffles. Your words (the ones who trickled out rather than tumbled) rang clearer than the orange blinker on the screen. At least you blotted out the screeching tires of my attempt to join the speed-lane of the worldwide web.

I smiled to myself, imagining you with your eyes wandering the room, one hand fiddling with hair or cloth or fidgeting uneasily like a spider… only five legs on that one… you must have cut off the others. Never really liked the hairy beasts, did you?

But your voice was there, behind the gospel that sprung to life. You giggled away as the tires stopped, screeching replaced by the scratch of a pencil. “The last section…” and the radio was turned off. ‘Last section’, I thought, ‘no other thoughts now, just think.’

My mind worked furiously, intellectually for the last leg – thank God it was no race, my crutches wouldn’t take me far. Time was about to be called, and for a second, my heart leapt. The crotchets, now blotches, had settled in the wrong F-A-C-E and the symphony was ruined forever.

I still wonder now, amidst the revived white noise, why your voice doesn’t return to me. O beautiful betrayer, it wasn’t your fault. But maybe, this once, defying me and standing by my side, may have saved me from the fatality of the pulled plug.