Clara and the Songs

They were going to kill her. Not on purpose; this wasn’t malice. It was love, of a sort anyway. It was both ironic and tragic. Which is just the sort of thing Clara would normally appreciate. It would make a great song. Through the closed door, she could hear the chorus of voices calling her name from down the hallway. They were getting closer, whipped up in a frenzy, and desperate to reach her. They began to pound on her door.

This was a twist she had not expected. In the beginning, her songs had been tame things. She wrote them, and they behaved as expected. They followed her around, polite and unimposing. They were well-mannered and always offered their seats on the bus to elderly passengers. They had been -still were, objectively speaking- beautiful things. Some sweet and demure, others bold and joyful. And she had loved them. All of them. That they could have have turned against her like this was unthinkable.

She had written her first song in her freshman year. Music theory had, at first, been an elective of convenience, not passion. But before midterms, she found herself humming a little tune of her own creation. After a few days, the lyrics fell into place, and she felt the itch to play it, to make it real. So she sat at the computer and, using half-understood software, composed and played her first song. It was a melodic, dreamy thing. She loved it immediately.

No one had paid much attention to her first song. It followed her to class, occupying an empty desk near the window in Literature 101 and sometimes sitting on the folding table near the door for Intro to Women’s Studies. A few people commented, but never to Clara’s face and never within hearing of the song. It wasn’t a problem, really. Just a little unconventional. Her dorm mate went out of her way to make the song feel at home and didn’t complain about the need for extra seating.

By the time Clara had written her seventh or eighth song, hospitality was wearing thin. One song had been easy enough to live with. But once she had a gaggle of musical companions shadowing her, it became more than a little odd. It became impractical. They took up the whole dorm room, always in the way of whatever cabinet needed opening and sometimes overflowing into the hallway, garnering warnings from the floor’s RA.

She was asked to get her own place. But, left on surprisingly good terms with her dorm mate, all things considered. Her new apartment was in an unremarkable green building a few blocks from the University. She had to pick up extra hours at the coffee shop to afford the upgrade, but her unit was on the top floor, near the heavy grey door that granted roof access. If anyone was bothered by her songs’ nightly presence on the roof, they never mentioned it.

Still, it did not come as a surprise when, in the second trimester of Junior year, around the time she wrote her 27th song, she received a formal warning from the Dean; not only was the school’s general forbearance wearing thin, but the songs were creating a fire hazard. They squeezed themselves into the smaller classrooms like sardines, occupying every inch of floor space and blocking the exits. Her classmates- once the novelty had worn off- started to grumble about the need to keep their personal belongings in their laps. The Dean offered a compromise by installing a fleet of sterile metal benches in the hallways outside her classes. However, as their numbers grew, the songs were eventually banished to the quad, with access to the gym bleachers on rainy days. They adjusted to the distance, although they weren’t happy about it. So far from Clara, they were hazy and dull. Songs, after all, aren’t much more than a collection of notes and words outside the company of someone who appreciates them.

Even with the issues of housing and classroom politics settled, living with so many songs became increasingly challenging. Their bus fare alone was untenable on barista money. And as the driver held rather inflexible policies about them riding on the roof or inching out a seat on the bumper, Clara was forced to stay close to home more often than not.

As her trips across town died down, Clara’s friends and family took notice. They began to gently suggest that she take a break from writing new songs until she figured out what to do with the ones she already had. It would have been a good suggestion, were it not impossible. Songwriting had become less of a choice and more of a compulsion by then. First, a little hook would get stuck in her head, then it would grow into a full melody. Finally, the right words would drop into place like missing puzzle pieces. They always felt more discovered than crafted. Once it all came together in her mind - music and lyrics- there began an incessant thrumming in her chest. A forward momentum, pushing her to write it out, to play it. It consumed her thoughts. It was best not even to try to hold a conversation with her once a new song idea had caught her attention. Friends and coworkers grew accustomed to the distant expressions and perfunctory responses. Nothing else could hold her interest until she had a completed song standing there in front of her.

She could not stop, even if she had wanted to. Which she didn’t. But she had to find a better way to live with her creations. The songs needed to be seen, to be appreciated. But not necessarily by her. So, she began to introduce her songs to people at school and in nearby shops. They had seen them around, of course, but seeing a song is different from knowing it. She gave proper introductions to friends and a few family members; she knew exactly who would hit it off. She took them to the park and introduced a few to the hacky-sack crowd and the stoners. Despite their previous dust-up, she even found just the right songs to keep the bus driver alert for his mid-afternoon shifts.

This was, she thought, the perfect plan. She wondered why she had been so hesitant to introduce her songs to others. She supposed she had been worried that they might be rejected or criticized. Songs can be sensitive to that sort of thing. Thankfully, the response had been overwhelmingly positive. Her songs were not only occupied while she was at school or work, but people really seemed to love them. She started to see them in unexpected places, hanging out with people she didn’t even know. She was flattered, really, to know that her songs could make so many people happy, that so many people wanted them around. Understood them.

She had been mostly right. People did love her songs and want them around. They couldn’t get enough of them. But what it means to understand a song is complicated, and her songs’ essential natures were not as steadfast as she had believed. She first got an inkling of this when her cross-town bus route passed by the cemetery. Out the window, she spotted a love song. All pink and fluttery, it was one of her early creations. It was standing, somber, amid a circle of mourners as a casket was slowly lowered into the ground. Clara began to raise her hand to get its attention, but stopped. Something was different. It was her song, as she had written it. She could see that not a single note or word had been changed. And yet, it was altered in some fundamental way. This sweet, soft love song had, at graveside, turned achingly sad and haunting.

Later, she heard that one of her saddest songs, usually shrouded and dark, with its head kept low, had been spotted dancing and sighing, nearly twinkling at the high school prom. Her first breakup song had somehow talked its way into the father-daughter dance at the wedding of a friend of a friend. She heard that it had been smiling the whole time, had been the life of the party, really. Clearly, her songs were not the solid, stable things she had thought they were. They were changelings, shifting shapes and textures in relationship to the people around them. She wondered if perhaps she had always known this, in some way. She wondered if that was why she had been so hesitant to offer introductions.

When she graduated, her school had to relocate the ceremony to a larger venue to accommodate not only the usual attendees plus her songs (there were 93 by then), but also- and this surprised her- the people who had grown to love her songs. She knew only a handful of them. Most she had never met. While she had created the songs, the songs had created their own relationships with people, and those people thought they knew her, loved her even, by extension. This wasn’t true, of course. But that day, looking out onto the crowd, it seemed like a beautiful idea. She had wanted to believe it.

In the years after graduation, the popularity of her songs only increased. People loved them. Perhaps, too much. She had lost count of how many songs she had written exactly, but she couldn’t go anywhere without bumping into one on the street (which was always a delightful surprise). But despite their constant presence around town, people still wanted more. More than even she could write.

They would corner her at the coffee shop, asking if she was working on anything “boppy” for the summer. More than one bride-to-be had grown pushy about whether they should save a seat for a new love song on the big day (something tearful but not weepy). The demands were incessant. She tried to view this as a compliment, not just to her, but to her songs. She had introduced them to the world, but they had done their own magic to work their way into the hearts of so many. Sometimes, she wished they hadn’t.

Like now.

The banging had not stopped. The doorknob jiggled, hinting at both a staggering audacity and heightened danger. Rumors had been spreading around town for weeks that she was working on a new song. Not just any new song, something extraordinary. Her most remarkable yet. In truth, she hadn’t written any song at all in weeks. She hadn’t felt that thrumming pull to create. But, this crowd was insistent that something special was coming and that they be the first to know. The first to see it. She had been dodging groups like this for days now, but they seemed to be getting only more persistent. Instead of losing interest, they were gaining steam.

The rumors and the resulting frenzied crowds troubled her. But not as much as their source. People- everyone, in fact- insisted that it was the songs that had told them. Her songs. The mobs were growing unmanageable, dangerous. And it was her own songs that had been whispering false hopes in their ears. At first, she hadn’t believed it. People did seem to see what they wanted in her songs. When she had asked, every song had shrugged, played dumb about the whole thing. But the stories of their whisper campaign were too consistent to be easily dismissed. Still, it was hard to imagine they could ever be so thoughtless; surely they could have predicted this outcome. She glanced at the trio of songs that had joined her in leaning against the door. They were sympathetic, but otherwise unconcerned.

The pounding and chanting began to slow. Then quiet altogether. The crowd was dispersing, slowly but surely. A few stragglers lingered briefly, hopeful, before retreating down the hall. As she heard them move away, she slid to the floor, her heart rate finally slowing. Clara took a deep breath and exhaled, listening to the receding steps in the hallway. Or perhaps that was the sound of her heart. Or both.

The rhythm continued after she knew the last of them had gone. The footsteps. Her beating heart. The pounding of the door. A thrumming in her chest. She was humming the melody before she made it to her feet. The lyrics dropped into place almost as quickly. And so, she began to write.

The song was extraordinary. Raw yet mellifluous. Weighty and shimmering all at once. Tragic and beautiful. People loved it. They had never heard anything like it. It was a revelation, and was all anyone could talk about. The mobs had stopped hounding her, of course, and she was thankful for the peace and quiet.

There was a renewed interest in her and her songs, all of them. Everyone wanted to know how she did it, how she had crafted so many amazing songs over the years, and where she had come up with this one. She was able to tell them the truth. Though she had only recently come to understand it. It was simple, actually; the songs wrote themselves.