Page 203 of Notes of Attraction

I start to cry without even realizing.

Playing four chords makes me feel more than any exam ever could.

I didn’t stop playing when he died.

I stopped playing before that, in the middle of the sixth move. I loved that town, and I wanted to stay, but his music was making us move again. I stood in a half-packed up kitchen and said the guitar and music had ruined every good thing we’d ever had. I said I was never going to be like him. I wanted to hurt him. I still remember the devastated look on his face.

Then I put the guitar in its case and shoved it towards him. I told him to take it back.

He wouldn’t take it back. He carried it upstairs and put it in my closet and said it would be there when I needed it.

I’m sorry, Daddy.

I have spent ten years building a case against my father and why he fucked up and how much I resented the way he chose to live his life. But I’ve been looking at it all wrong. Yeah, he made some mistakes. He was human. But he gave me this—the ability to be playful, play music, and be light. He taught me how to listen and feel into music. This invaluable gift.

I forgive him, I realize suddenly through the tears. Sure, he wasn’t perfect, but I’m grateful for the life he gave me and what he taught me, and I forgive him.

The lightness that comes with that is the relief I’d been searching for after my exam. My heart feels lighter and my breath deeper.

I play the leaving song one more time, all the way through, and at the end, I don’t put the guitar back in the case.

I lean it against the wall by my desk, in the open, where I’ll see it. Where it can stop being ‘broken’ and I can play it anytime I feel numb or need to work through something.

I don’t pick the laptop back up. There’s no question bank tonight. There’s no question bank tomorrow, or the day after. For the first time in what feels like forever, there is a stretch of empty days in front of me with nothing I’m supposed to be doing in them.

I could learn a song. A whole one. Just because I want to.

The thought is so foreign it’s almost funny.

I can do something just because I want to.

Cal

how was the exam?

Bea

good. I think.