Page 98 of We Were Eternal Once

The songs, though, they stayed.

Someone hit a broken piece of furniture rhythmically as I sang, keeping a beat. Another tapped along his legs, his stomach, his head, percussing.

A woman joined in, her voice low and melodic, humming a tune to match mine. Someone else pulled out a recorder and captured it all, lifting the recorder high so as to take every sound.

We finished together. I don’t know how, but they understood when the song was over. They understood when I no longer needed to sing.

I joined Réka, ducking my head at the clapping that followed.

“I did not know you had a voice,” Réka said, shoving my shoulder.

“Neither did I,” I admitted.

That is when I stopped walking toward death, and instead through it. It was not a conscious decision, not a moment I knew and understood. It was a slow unsettling. I’d spent so many centuries wanting to die, and now I did not.

I did not want to live, but I did not want to die either.

Budapest was where I began to walk through it. I stopped ignoring what drove me underground and instead tried to feel it. I sang songs from my memory and let the disillusioned youth clap along and add their voices. It did not drown my own, it added to it. It was strength, it was resilience, it was growth. I moved through without being dragged under again.

Tonight I am to sing at one of the clubs. It is different from the slam poetry meetings. This is a party, where the humans come to get drunk and do drugs and have sex. It is a place where they forget, not remember.

I take the stairs to the basement, where the music grows louder and louder. I have to put cloth in my ears to stand it. I don’t know how the humans do, I am sure they will go deaf one day from it.

Réka meets me at the base of the steps.

“I thought you were chicken,” she says.

“Chickening out,” I correct.

“I thought you were out chicken,” she says, then grins when I try to correct her again. “Mel, you are melancholy,” she says and kisses my cheek. She is no stranger to closeness, to intimacy. The new world does not care if you hold hands in public, or if you are kissing on a street corner.

Unless you are two men or two women, or two people they cannot shove into those boxes. Then they become angry.

But not down here. In the basement, no one cares.

“Réka, you are…” I trail off, because I do not know the Hungarian word for what I want to say. “Fotiá mou,” I land on.

“Is that Greek?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“What does it mean?”

“Directly? My fire. But indirectly…no translation.”

Réka grins and grabs my hand to lead me to the man in charge of the music.

“This is her!” she yells over the noise. He holds up two fingers and we slip into the crowd for two songs. Réka is close to me, her body pressed to mine. We say hello to others we recognize; we mingle along the edges of the crowd.

Then the music man motions for me, and I take the microphone. I sing a song from Rome, a tragedy of a lover lost to war and a woman who waits for his return. It’s haunting, one of my favorites. I wonder if anyone remembers this song. Not the words—the Romans were famous for recording things. But the way it was sung, how you pause for a long time after you mention the ship on the horizon that blinks away.

Did time erase the tones? The tune?

Is it still the same song if these rules are not remembered?

The music man adds his twist. He understands the song is sad, I told him it was. I told him it was about longing for something that no longer lives.

“Something that no longer lives? Like a dead person?” he asked.