Page 91 - Contrast2014

tune, faint and faraway, echoing through the atmosphere.
She never doubted its source. It was the song of the stars.

She thought about those stars, burning themselves up,
tearing themselves apart, just to shine for a moment, and
she wondered if the astrophysicists ever considered what
song the universe was humming, when they scrawled their
numbers and equations across university blackboards and
realized that cosmic background radiation had a sound.

She knew that her college years were supposed to be
golden, glowing, bright happy memories, captured in
nostalgic sepia and pinned to the bulletin board of her
life, but in college, she wrote her life in minor keys. Quiet
and more than a little sad; angry crescendos and crashing
chords. There were too many late nights and long hours
in the practice rooms; her vocal cords cracking from the
strain, frustrated tears stinging at the corners of her eyes.
She was never quite sure that music was good for her
before, but at school, it began to take her apart, piece by
piece. It left hairline fractures all the way up her
supporting spine, spiderwebbing the brittle enameled
surface of her bones. If it was not already in her veins, it
seeped into her bloodstream then, a lurking poison
coursing through her body.

Sometimes she thought about tearing herself away.
She daydreamed about dropping out or studying
something else, anything else; she envisioned a life lived
in business-casual clothing and the fluorescent lighting of
an office complex. Sometimes she even thought that it
didn't sound so bad. But whenever she really wondered if
she could do it, her fingernails left little red marks in her
palms and she felt like she was about to be sick. Maybe
she could have left, earlier, but by the time the idea
crossed her mind it was too late. She was too far in, too

contrast I 89