Xiaole Zhan
Allegretto
When I am asking you to be careful, I am asking you to grieve for me. The smile you gave the small boy today was so clean and easy, it practically fell from your face, loose moonwhite tooth. I was playing my Mozart and all I could think about in the allegretto was your smile, no way to describe it other than a sort of careless love. I remember someone saying that playing Mozart has to be like walking on knives. There has to be an element of fear. The music is that spare, that clean. I remember someone saying that every note has to cost you something, and all I could see were beads of blood, row upon row of perfect and circular minute horrors. When the music is marked adagio, it is asking you to play at a slower tempo, like this, but what the words are really saying is ad agio, at ease. Sometimes it hurts to breathe when someone asks you to count in and out too slowly. Sometimes your easy happiness hurts me the way it hurts to look at snow. Sometimes the words mean more than what they can say. Sometimes the words are overheard as something else. Take the word carrion, for example. What I meant to say is carian is the Old English verb related to chara, ‘grief’. What I really meant to say is in that moment I wanted to hold you in my arms so badly that it still hurts. What I am saying is I want you to care. What I am saying is I want you to care for me.
Adagio
When the music is marked adagio, it is asking you to speak with ease. The day I realised this, the trees outside my window were alight in red and orange glow. I was playing my Scarlatti, and I was told it was too melodramatic.
I thought of this line of a poem: I believe in death, I believe in the last tree I will ever see, perhaps with wind in it just as it’s turning colour. The beauty of this line didn’t have anything to do with language. Or poetry. All it did was describe it as it is, and it is. I knew then that some things are beautiful because they remind you of other things. Other things are beautiful because they are.
The pain is never easy. Sometimes you can only sit with it. Sit in it. I was talking to my friend, M, about you. I always envied the ease of your happiness. I remember saying that if the whole world was filled with your happiness, all the libraries would be tall, empty pillars of joy.
When the music is marked adagio, it is asking you to speak the truth. I wanted to dismiss you as the death of a dream, but pain is pain is pain is.
I remember asking M if I should still stay hopeful. I stopped short when she responded with —
Yes.
I thought she had misunderstood me. She said that I should stay hopeful, but not in the sense of expecting something positive to happen, only in the simplest sense of hope. There is more to come. Stay curious.
The pain is never easy. Sometimes all I could do was listen to music to remind myself that time passes. Music is like that. It passes.
Sometimes I think for music to exist at all, you need a certain degree of optimism. There has to be an openness to something yet to come. Curiosity.
When you begin to play a piece of music, what you are saying is there is a second after this second after this second. When you play a piece of music, what you are saying is time will pass.
What I am saying is there is more to come. What I am saying is I am still curious. What I am saying is
I am here.
I am a coincidence of limbs.
I ask for nothing.
Xiaole Zhan is a writer and composer currently in second-year university studies. Her name in Chinese is 小乐 and means ‘Little Happy’ but can also be read as ‘Little Music’. She was the winner of the National Schools Poetry Award 2019 and the first-equal winner of the 2019 Secondary Schools Division of the Sargeson Short Story Prize.
The poem quoted in ‘Adagio’ is ‘Jesus Wept’ by Stanley Plumly.