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But I couldn’t decipher what she meant by that non-question. I didn’t have enough brain cells left. I was already, deeply, gone.
‘Eden,’ I repeated. ‘Eden.’
This was the first piece of music that had ever pierced me right through the chest. Her name on my lips.
We met this way for months.
I learned all about her. She listened to me practice and compose music. She didn’t tell me much about her family, except that she was an only child, and that her dad was rich, which I could see from her clothes, and overprotective, which I could also see from the way she kept glancing at her watch. She always had a curfew, but she rarely talked about that. She told me about the books she was reading and how they made her feel less alone.
I told her about my dad, and about how I always wanted to make him proud but kept failing. I told her about how I was the least talented musically in my family and she had laughed until she gasped for breath. I told her about the music I constantly heard inside my head. We wrote some really bad songs together. I wrote the music as she hummed along, and then we tried to write lyrics together.
When summer came, I asked her to come visit my home. We were so young. I didn’t realize how fragile she looked—was. I didn’t realize that even though I knew everything there was to know about her soul, I still didn’t know a lot about her life. And I didn’t want to ask her if she’d be my girlfriend. She was my friend, my reason for getting up every morning. Calling her my girlfriend seemed somehow too small. She didn’t want to leave her dad.
So we texted and called every day for a month, but we never visited each other.
When the new school year started, I was so hungry for her I could barely breathe. The first time I saw her again, we didn’t exchange more than three words. We kissed the entire time. It was time to be more to each other.
It was time to be everything to each other.
In the months that followed, I fell completely behind in my lessons, but I didn’t even notice, until one day she asked me how on earth I was able to spend so much time with her and still be on top of my demanding syllabus. She was homeschooled, so she didn’t have that problem, she said. Then she insisted that I bring my lessons with me next time, or she’d turn right around and head home. So I brought them.
And, what’s more, I studied them. She made me.
In that sense, I owe everything I am today to her.
By the next spring, I was well on my way to graduate with honors, already accepted into college and, even though by that time my heart was in shreds, I hadn’t forgotten how to study. I kept going at it like a robot. She had taught me how, and I still did it after she left. I learned instrument after instrument within a matter of months, enough so that I ended up recording my first song, Saint Hope, and its music all by myself in my childhood bedroom.
I had been expelled from school by then—and rejected by every single college in America.
In the end, she took away everything she’d ever given me, including my ability to love.
All she left me was music.
So that had to be my weapon.
…
“Dude. Dude.”
Someone is shaking me. The music around me has stopped and everything looks ugly.
“What’s wrong?” Dimitris is asking me, his face scrunched up with worry.
“Nothing,” I reply hoarsely, shaking myself out of the memories.
Nothing indeed.
Eden and I are now officially nothing to each other. And it had better stay that way.
“Hey there, new guy!” Yiannis has gotten up and is shouldering his way towards his brother and me.
“Yiannis, right?” I ask and he nods. I reach out my hand and he shakes it in an easy yet confused manner. “I’m Isaiah. Speak English?”
He nods. “Ligo. A little.”
“Right.” I point to the stool. “You’re good.” He blushes again. “Wanna play with me? No English needed for music.” He looks at a stray, unclaimed guitar uncertainly, and I don’t make a move to grab it, even though my fingers are itching for its strings “I’m good, I promise.”
Laughter erupts from Dimitris, and a moment later from Yiannis, who got the translated version. He shrugs.
