Intro - xx

The Last Song

It's the same melody. The same song.

He could recognise it anywhere. It's all he knows, after all. It's all he has lived for. For this song to come alive at the break of dawn, or at twilight perhaps, when the sun dips in the silent river.

He wishes to capture it, but dreams are temporary, passing. Nothing he could hold on for long. It is the way of life.

He was a little boy when it first came to him, the dream that consumes his nights. He grew older, his voice became deeper, drawling. The dream, the song residing in it, it eventually consumed his days too, his senses, and his imagination.

No one understands it.

How can they? They haven't heard the distant notes of the most beautiful song. He listens to it every night, in his dream. It's a routine, a habit. An addiction. Without the song, his dream is pointless, he's lost in there. It's like a sleepless night, only that the sleep is profound, a distorted dream accompanying it, but the sharp notes of the song are missing, and without them he feels a part of him is missing too.

It never happens. Since the dream first filled his nights, the mellow notes with it, it has never left him alone. His dream is never a pointless one, he's never lost in there. It's something that gives him purpose, an identity almost, his little secret.

It wasn't one, when he was a small child, moping around the neighbourhood trying to string the broken melodies together. People used to like his music then, however off-key it would be. No one knew what he was singing, and he realised later that no one cared. He was a wobbling kid, singing a tune he had newly found in his morning dream, pressed to his mother's side as she went door to door.

He always clung to her, be it when she washed the dishes of every house they stepped in, or be it while she mopped the ground, he never left her side. He would try to sing the song, watching an object unblinkingly, not seeing it at all, and tug his mother's dress when he thought he sang it correct this time.

His mother was sweet, she would pass him a small encouraging smile, peck his forehead, return to her work. He always thought she understood him the most, although she had never heard the song, and never knew what he sang.

He still sings it, but more quietly now. He hums it all the time, all through the day. Especially when the coal mines start to become gloomier, where no one talks, except for the shouts of numerous orders and instructions every now and then. He's covered in soot each night he comes home.

He comes home to nothing, but he brings back some steaming loaf of bread to eat, a filthy pair of trousers and shirt for him to wash, and he brings back a song.

It was nothing at first, the song that filled his dream each night. He was very small to decipher the meaning behind it. Very small to comprehend the complexity of it's notes.

Very small to realise, that it was a melody beyond any of the mechanics humans had ever created to understand the magic behind music.

It felt like a forgotten memory, the night he lied awake thinking about the dream, and what the melody brought him to feel. He never remembered the dream itself, but he always remembered the melody. It was the same each night. The same sweet tunes ringing in his ears.

As he grew old enough to understand what it really was, he was old enough to ask the questions too. He spent his days wondering why it came in his dreams in the first place, plucking the fruits from the orchard to sell, help his mother with some cents. Soon, he decided there wasn't a reason perhaps, or maybe it wasn't needed anymore. It made him happy, and that was enough. Him, his mother, and his melody. That made his days sweeter than the apples in the orchard.