A Forgotten Melody

The world was silent. Not in the absence of sound, but within the true silence that exists in the beauty of nature. A low hum of consistent static rolled through the streets, ebbing and flowing with the breeze. Passing through alleys and swelling over dusty park benches, ancient pages rose and fell. Swaths of dust swirled, carrying with them the quiet of simplicity. Leaves rustled and birds chirped, echoing melodies from eons past warped through the refrains of new generations.

The ecosystem lived in a harmonious balance. Nothing disturbed the eternal crescendo of endless lives, born from the hushed fall of humans—much like the cycle of water—returning to Yren from their time in the skies. Even the muted screams of haunted avenues, carefully parked vehicles that dotted the causeways—their flight stolen away by time and disuse—and great monuments forged from steel and glass like rusted staccatos stretching into the blue oblivion above, hummed in time with the world that surrounded them.

This great score, blending the faded, discordant rhythms of the past with the slow, swelling tempo of the new world, found within itself an anomaly. Despite the smooth passage of the currents of time, a single reed, bent near to breaking split the waters. This note was not harsh, nor did it grate. This wandering tone, ancient in its own right, swayed with the flow, allowing the waters to glide past, remaining barely perceived as it drifted along. This wanderer rarely stopped, except to listen.

In what had once been a bustling city erupting with energy, waves of electric power skipping from one rooftop to another, the wanderer stopped. They set their hat to the ground, sitting with eyes closed and palms to the crumpled concrete and opened their soul. It sang. It sang with the quiet confidence of age: long, bowed rhythms that spilled from a cello. It was a simple baseline, mellow and serene; each note melded comfortably into the next. The soul, laid bare, teased its beautiful tone, pleading with the sounds and rhythms without to listen and reciprocate. It played and waited, searching the annals of history engrained in the tapestry of notes.

The wanderer foraged through the melodies, picking them apart as they reacted to the wanderer’s soul: a swift legato played as the wind blew past, tiny trills with each twirling of a leaf. They plead with the long wholes of buildings swaying, while empty rests created gaps between each ant as it worked, carrying food back to their dens. They delved into the vast networks of arpeggios accenting tiny paws crawling their way through tunnels. In all of these, there was nothing. No sign of those the wanderer had once left. Those who had existed eons ago.

Those melodies had been long forgotten by time. The swift, familial rhythm of home had finally vanished. And so, the wanderer sat, soul bare to the music of the world, craving a memory.

None came.

With head bowed, a sigh escaped their lips: a singular sound. It rang out, echoing in the hollow of their chest, defeated. All memories had finally fled the minds of even the ancient cities, having decomposed into something entirely different and foreign.

Still, their soul remained open, straining against the emptiness of the world around them, barely capable of singing. Even in its exhaustion, however it hummed the rhythms, pressing outward.

As the song concluded, the wanderer began to slump, a tiny tear rolling from their cheek, landing with the weight of a timpani onto the pavement below. A splotch, dark against the sun-bleached stone lay quietly, the sound of its impact spreading outward in a wave.

The roots were the first to respond. The slow creep of the trees returned the sound, passing it from one end to the other, snaking over and under the concrete and between foundations of buildings. They mimicked its tone, reverberating in the wanderer’s soul. They stiffened, straightening their posture. The trees had passed the new inclusion to the monuments of steel and they rang, the repressed screams quieting entirely as they played a new song.

The wind whispered it to the birds, who soared overhead, echoing the mournful note, introducing it to their songs and chirping it to any creature that might hear. The wanderer, however, shook their head. It was not the melody of a people long forgotten. Still, it beckoned with outstretched tendrils, a fermata waiting for direction from the conductor.

From within, a faint memory. A time where the full orchestra of the wanderer’s people washed over and drowned out the subtle harmonies. The harmonies of nature that swept to and fro, searching for a home, twisting and flitting with no place to rest. The orchestra had slowly grown tired with age. New musicians or instruments had not graced the stage in centuries. Each plucked string and blared horn sagged and slowed, burdened by the endless repeats of notes slowly wandering off key.

They’d heard the widening divide and with time, they had turned their sights on the remains of the once distant rhythms.

The wanderer wept, recalling the instruments closest to them vanishing one by one, joining the soft harmonies of nature. Their sounds hadn’t vanished, no, but instead transformed. They still sung the same song, but had changed instruments to match the trees, the grasses, the squirrels, or the birds. Even the small band that had once roved with the wanderer eventually left.

The wanderer listened, not to the memory of ancient songs, but to the reply. They called, summoning them silently through notes held on long tenutos. They had resisted thus far, stubbornly holding the single tone defiant in the endless stream. Perhaps, however, it was time. The tired sound of a solitary, archaic violin yearned to rejoin the score, to play music once again. The time, like the conductor’s baton, had finally arrived. It was time to return and become a fresh part of the great whole.

And so, in a field, not far from a once great city, a body came to rest. The physical object of it lying, a new melody taking it over as the song, that single, weathered note, rushed in and joined the sturdy harmonies of a tree. No longer forever locked into a single beat, but endlessly growing, swelling, and changing.