The Jump That Left Me Stranded

Chapter 18

"Life necessitates transitions...but a true transition is one which finds it spontaneity and its surprise somewhere other than violence. [In verse] a line can be taken up by a sequence of lines without being impaired, without ceasing to be itself".  

- Christopher Ricks (On Wordsworth: Pure Organic Pleasure from the Lines) 

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My dad is trying to coax me in the least manipulative way he can. He sits in his room and plays music on the guitar, 'practicing' as he says, but I know he's trying to jolt me into joining him with the vague hope that those chords might trigger some reflex response in me. I guess I hadn't really noticed the way my fingers are curled into themselves until just now, the way I'm all tense with my forehead pressed against my bedroom door and my breathing alarmingly heavy. 

I slide my nose upwards, wishing there was some way to stop up my ears so I could have a quiet moment to think. But who am I fooling: if it's not music, it's my own damn thoughts doing laps around my brain. Secrets, memories, numbness. What's the harm? I toy with the idea, cast a wary eye at my keyboard, let my hand relax with an open palm against the door in an effort to de-stress. I wonder briefly why it is that I only make a conscious effort to do this when I'm panicking.

Against my general outlook I do believe in my father's words (that something can be different and not necessarily worse) but I'm scared of everything nowadays and that includes the music - the strange vacuum it sucks me in to. My own hand flinches as I close it around the handle and I almost find it laughable how viscerally my discomfort manifests. 

"Dad," I say, padding out into the hall, the erratic heartbeat back and trying to fend me off. "Do you think we could run over something?" 

The guitar stops, the last note dissolves into silence. My dad's eyes blink up at me with a surprise I know he's trying hard to mask. It makes me even more nervous but I try and act like I'm fine, try and act as though time isn't convulsing like a dying snake wrapped around my ankles, not sure what to make of this moment of agency and trying to trip me back into my earlier stillness.

"Sure, something classical?" 

I bite my lip, and then shake my head. 

"No. No, I think I want to do something a bit more...fun?" I wince at the question. 

My dad, accommodating as ever, nods and unloops his guitar from around his neck - treads along behind me back to my room. 

"I've been working on a jazz score actually," He tells me as we settle down. "I enjoyed watching that film with you a lot the other day". 

I feel the strange heartburn of gratitude, the urge to tell him that I love him, but sometimes I think my dad's brain is geared to respond to actions rather than words - I swallow down my apprehensions and lean into the music again. 

He guides me through some chords and rhythmic patterns and I entertain myself by switching between sounds on my keyboard, by matching my playing to the strums of his guitar with an ear for pitch that I'm glad still to have. My brain occasionally strays back to thoughts I don't want to deal with, so I concentrate harder and find my fingers forget the invisible pathways that they're tracing. My dad doesn't wind himself up like I'm scared of; he laughs and fudges his riffs, too. 

"It's all part of the genre". 

I'm not too sure I agree with him - think jazz is more so for controlled chaos than actual mistakes  - but it's easier to laugh than to get angry, so I laugh.

My phone buzzes from my bedside table - my eyes zero in and see Jenny's name as a notification banner, her first text in a while. My brain starts boiling again, a too-high temperature for someone trying to forget it all for a while, the bitter sting of some kind of betrayal, so I lean over and press my phone face-down against the wood. My dad doesn't say anything about any of this but his laughter stops and he turns his head down to watch his fingers pluck against the strings. My own fingers itch as I stare.