the habit of being

We finally got kicked out of St. John’s this morning, and I’m sitting on a bench in the Plaza while J. seeks out a restroom. We slept in a booth at the coffee shop last night, until the security guard woke us up to close the building. Then, when he saw us again the next morning, scampering to thaw out our frozen toes, he asked us if we were students and then told us we weren’t “allowed here ‘like that.’”

We spent the entire day yesterday in the student center, and I’d napped in both the coffee shop and the girls bathroom, after having been completely unable to sleep the night before. Thoughts of I don’t remember what raced through my head all night. We put together a jigsaw puzzle of a unicorn with a handful of missing pieces. J played Go while I rested in the booth. We read Frodo and our latest used bookstore purchases - my Autobiography of a Yogi and his Bonfire of the Vanities, and we sat still and didn’t walk anywhere (a rarity).

J stumbled onto the choir practicing one of his favorite pieces - Allegri’s Miserere, and he brought me there (upstairs), and we listened, transfixed and in awe. They’d sing a few haunting passages, filled with such sadness and beauty and truth, and we sat outside the door on a bench, hanging on to every syllable breathlessly. I became quite hypnotised by the movements of the conductor’s arms and hands, tracing a ribbon through the air, and everything started to blur. Then they’d go out of tune and or the teacher would make an error and suddenly it would all come to a halt, the singers cutting off suddenly and standing there laughing, people again.

The music was so amazing, alike only to Mozart’s Requiem in pieces I know, though I’m not well-versed in classical music. Requiem is my favorite and I once listened to it daily. “Hallowing,” maybe, is the word for such music. James said it made him happy that he could be sad. It was the perfect thing to say. It is the most beautiful sadness, but not an exaltation of sadness, simply desperate and accepting, unending and intense - even intensely fragile.

He recognized it immediately and he took me there. I was quickly taken, deep inside myself and in that moment all at once.

(Continued that night in a truck stop in Albuquerque)

After a break we seated ourselves on the floor of the Great Hall, against a wall, facing the full choir. We could watch them, their faces even, as they sang. I searched for the solo soprano who rang out above all the others in a piercing stream of unhumanly high notes which flowed down in a triplet structure and held the entire mood of the piece in a thread noose. I picked out the correct girl before they even started singing again. She was the one who looked like she could sing that part. She was tall and thin with curly hair and pure expression. Her entire body arched when she reached for those tight pitches.They fell down back into the song of the others like a waterfall, and I stared at this girl, amazed, all throughout the rest of the practice.

When I found myself in tears, I did not know whether it was the music or J’s hand on my leg or the thought of my own agony (itself sadder than any note or chord, but all the same beautiful) or the anglic face of this girl I knew nothing of, but had somehow come to worship, which moved me most. The faces then faded, along with the conductor’s arms and the imperfect tone of the amateur choir, and all seemed to be a feeling.. “divinest melancholy” the yogi would say.

I felt so close to James then, because I knew he felt it too. He knew this thing, if not as I did then with at least the same intensity, and we both understood it as we did with the help of the other. Whatever may happen in the end we had given each other that moment of understanding.

After the choir had practiced another piece and been dismissed, I walked up to the wailing soprano and said, in my silly Southern accent, “I wanna BE you,” and a few other things about how it was lovely and I had cried. She was very polite and he voice and eyes were kind. I told her my name and she said she was Emily. James asked her when the show was amd she told him, but I couldn’t pay attention. We walked out and I never really stopped crying.