The Harmony of Obsession

Chapter 5

Notes from the Authors:
Cello there, as you may have noticed, this story is carried out chronologically. In the previous chapter, Brett was in his final exam week, almost at the end of his first semester at uni. We thought why not to have a chapter written from Eddy's perspective to wrap up each semester, so here we go! Thank you so much for reading (you believe or not, we are having sooo much fun writing it)!

——B.M&D.D

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In the same year Brett entered university, Eddy, who just finished his one-year-long fellowship with Berlin Phil, started his new job as a lecturer on the tenure track at Brett's school, a music conservatory in Brisbane.

Finished packing up in his apartment from where he could see a beautiful view of the River Spree, he still wasn't sure from where the strong force that drove him back came.

Eddy never thought one day he would go back to that city where he spent the first fifteenth years of his life until he got accept to the pre-college program at Juilliard. In the past fifteen years, he had been trying so hard to separate himself from this city/country, started with erasing his Aussie accent. Now, if he didn't mention, nobody would even think that he was from Australia.

However, by the time he landed in Brisbane, when he came out of the airport, he was swallowed up by a sense of familiarity.

The hot and humid summer breeze, the blazing January sun, the fresh and salty smell of the ocean in the air, and everything that he used to refuse to accept as a part of his identity was now making him feel settling. He was a bit shocked by his idea of settling down at first but soon accepted the fact that he was getting old.

Eddy temporarily moved back to his parents' house in South Brisbane before his apartment was available on campus.

One day sitting outside a bubble tea shop int he Sunnybank Plaza, he saw a boy in a white t-shirt with a violin case on his back, bowing his head to have a sip of the bubble tea in his hand while dragging his feet on the pavement.

That boy's deadpan face reminded Eddy of his late adolescence when he infused all of his emotions into music and had a minimum amount of expressions on his face. But now, he was often forced to put on a smiley face in order to create an approachable impression, so that the critics of the music press wouldn't call him being pertinacious. Eddy looked at that boy's receding figure, dwelling upon his memoirs of those good old times in New York City.

It was Eddy's first time meeting Brett.

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From mid-February, weeks before the start of the new academic year, Eddy moved into his new apartment and was fully occupied with meetings and new faculty training sessions. While he skimmed through the long list of duties that he had to fulfill as a member of the department, a satisfying sensation was welling up spontaneously within him. Perhaps, he was predestined to be a professor.

At the beginning of March, the sun shining hot persistently in the sky made Eddy think of the fire in the loins of a teenage boy madly in love. Then he mocked himself at his erotic metaphor.

After a three-hour-long morning meeting and an interminable chat with his colleagues, Eddy was already late to his convocation faculty performance rehearsal. Running downstairs from the conference room, at the entrance, he saw a boy in a white T-shirt and black jeans having a violin case on his back was standing outside under the scorching midday sun. With his head lifted, he looked into the sun's direction, which was as bright as his future.

Eddy recognized the boy from his side view when he walked past by him. He was the boy whom Eddy met at the boba place. Getting him with a smile and a nod, "Hello," he intentionally lowered his voice as if it were their first time meeting each other.

Apparently, he was not expecting Eddy to say hi to him, moving his lips, and a feeble sound of "hi" came out from his mouth. Chuckling over the younger one's nervousness for a second after walking away, Eddy also thought he had a delusion that the younger one's eyes were gazing at him.

After encountering that boy in the hallway when he was lost, seeing him sitting in the back row on the first day of his class, and rushing to other buildings between classes, Eddy realized he still didn't know his name. Shortly after he got busier and busier with teaching, practicing, and course preparation, he forgot about it.

Eddy returned to his office after dinner to prepare his courses or practice a few pieces until 11 p.m. It took around 15 mins to walk back to his apartment from the department building, about the length of Bach's chaconne from the violin partita no. 2 in D minor. Switching off the lights, locking up the door, Eddy became accustomed to putting Perlman's recording on his phone when he left from his office late in the evening until a Tuesday in the middle of the semester.

One minute into Perlman's playing, arriving at the main entrance, Eddy ran into the white-t-shirt boy from the summertime. As the weather gradually cooled down upon the arrival of fall, that boy also switched into a white hoodie but was still wearing black jeans and having his violin case on his back.

On the same day, that boy came to Eddy's class again, sitting in the front row, and Eddy also got to know his name, Brett. Bre-tt: the meeting of the upper and lower lips is followed by the tip of the tongue taping on the teeth.
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Sometimes, they walked side by side, but mostly, Brett walked behind. Turning around to look for him, Eddy often saw the younger one bending his head with his hands in jeans' pockets, walking in his elongated shadow. His bangs dangled slightly over his eyebrows, looking softer in the pale shimmer of moonlight. Although Eddy couldn't see his face clearly, Eddy was aware that Brett always seemed happy, at least in front of him.

They chatted about random things, from what they had for dinner in the dining hall, to the pieces that they were working on recently. Brett had also asked him whether he was a cat-person or dog-person. Intentionally creating professional boundaries by not sharing with students too much information about himself, Eddy was initially not planning on answering this question.

However, after seeing the younger one bending his head in disappointment, he said: "dogs. I have never had a cat." The younger one looked up at him again smiled with his eye. "Yes, me too," he said.

His smile was glowing in the illumination of the crescent moon. In a moment, Eddy felt lost in Brett's smile and couldn't take his eyes off of the laugh lines that appeared on the around the outer corner of the younger one's eyes.

At first, they only "ran into" each other on Tuesdays when night drew in, then late in the eventing. Eventually, walking back together at 11:00 pm became their daily routine. Eddy even noticed that sometimes if he was caught up in the middle of something and left his office a few minutes later, the younger one would squat on one of the steps in front of the building, flipping through his backpack as if he were looking for something. As soon as Eddy came out, he zipped up his bag, stood up, smiled at him, and said, "Hello, Professor Chen."

"Is he waiting for me?"
Eddy thought to himself, but he never felt the need to ask the younger one, and he didn't mind having a company on his way back.