you can tell a man by how he lifts his hands
(This isn't fic, it's true. Just a freewrite.)
My mother gave me a music box yesterday; it’s wooden and simple and filled with dried rose petals. When I was young, it was in the room I moved into in the house we moved into in England. Inside, it says To Bert with Love, Christmas 1949. My mother told me I loved it when I was younger, and I can remember that like a song I heard years ago, the melody faint and the words long forgotten. I wonder who Bert was. I wonder, I cannot help but wonder, if he was in the war so few years before, if it was given him by a lover or a wife or a mother or father. Whoever it was, they were close enough that there was no need to sign a name. It’s me, the words say all this time later from where they’re carved into the wood.
The music itself stopped working sometime before I ever had it. I would have to break it to fix it, and the scent of the rose petals still linger in the air when I open it to examine it, reminding me it is too precious to take apart, even to satisfy my curiosity. I wonder what song it used to sing to break the silence. Did the giver choose the box for the song, or was it mere happenstance, a gift left too late to be fully considered before being bought? Christmas, 1949. It’s not so great a stretch of time. My mother and father weren’t yet born. My mother’s mother was in her teens, my father’s mother still in Germany, and Bert was in England. Bert, who was loved at least as much as a music box and dried rose petals can tell me.
The house I lived in was in a small village. Sheep grazed across the fence of my backyard, and through my window I could see them moving along the green grass. It rained in the autumn and the winter and the spring, and sometimes the summer, and the sky was often overcast, grey but not heavy. Did he live there, that Christmas? Or was the box brought from home to home across the years? Did the people before us leave it behind, or was it there when they came, and they never found it, or they chose to leave it with the house, or did not care about Bert and the person who loved him?
The world is slow and steady and unrepentant, constant as the tides that ebb and flow, persistent as the flowers that bloom and wither away as seasons pass. Somewhere, in the wide stretches of the world, Bert could be living, could be thinking about the Christmas he spent, about the weight of wood in his hands and the feel of it against his fingertips. He could be standing, looking out over green fields, a long ago heard melody in his ears, on his lips, memories of something long lost or handed away. It’s a song that I wish I could hear, even if just once.
.
My mother gave me a music box yesterday; it’s wooden and simple and filled with dried rose petals. When I was young, it was in the room I moved into in the house we moved into in England. Inside, it says To Bert with Love, Christmas 1949. My mother told me I loved it when I was younger, and I can remember that like a song I heard years ago, the melody faint and the words long forgotten. I wonder who Bert was. I wonder, I cannot help but wonder, if he was in the war so few years before, if it was given him by a lover or a wife or a mother or father. Whoever it was, they were close enough that there was no need to sign a name. It’s me, the words say all this time later from where they’re carved into the wood.
The music itself stopped working sometime before I ever had it. I would have to break it to fix it, and the scent of the rose petals still linger in the air when I open it to examine it, reminding me it is too precious to take apart, even to satisfy my curiosity. I wonder what song it used to sing to break the silence. Did the giver choose the box for the song, or was it mere happenstance, a gift left too late to be fully considered before being bought? Christmas, 1949. It’s not so great a stretch of time. My mother and father weren’t yet born. My mother’s mother was in her teens, my father’s mother still in Germany, and Bert was in England. Bert, who was loved at least as much as a music box and dried rose petals can tell me.
The house I lived in was in a small village. Sheep grazed across the fence of my backyard, and through my window I could see them moving along the green grass. It rained in the autumn and the winter and the spring, and sometimes the summer, and the sky was often overcast, grey but not heavy. Did he live there, that Christmas? Or was the box brought from home to home across the years? Did the people before us leave it behind, or was it there when they came, and they never found it, or they chose to leave it with the house, or did not care about Bert and the person who loved him?
The world is slow and steady and unrepentant, constant as the tides that ebb and flow, persistent as the flowers that bloom and wither away as seasons pass. Somewhere, in the wide stretches of the world, Bert could be living, could be thinking about the Christmas he spent, about the weight of wood in his hands and the feel of it against his fingertips. He could be standing, looking out over green fields, a long ago heard melody in his ears, on his lips, memories of something long lost or handed away. It’s a song that I wish I could hear, even if just once.
.