Rest

When rapture seeps into your system, there's not much you can do. You can pummel against it but it'll always be that anchor that drags your senses down. It'll prove more powerful than you give it credit for, more powerful than you. It'd be more effective to become a vessel for it, allow it to impel you towards its selected destination with no qualms.

At least that's what I decided to do. I'm dubious now whether it was an active or inert decision. At the time, it was just a decision. Something that would wrench me closer to Hali regardless of the scars it was scraping onto my soul. I just wanted to be bordering her ambience. If the truth was shuddered through silence, I still do. Regardless of how events coiled out of control.

***

"So you gonna see her again?" Billie Joe asked as he trailed his bag into a more settle position against his spine.

I analysed my feet chafing against the concrete as I permitted that option to spiral through my mind, creating a tail of dust behind it as it did. It had been four days since the gig at the Gilman and I'd relived every evanescent memory of that night with Billie Joe who indulged in it with a complaisant smile.

There was no phantom of doubt prowling in my mind that I wanted to see her again. Since that euphoric kiss glided into my system, it had over-rode all decisions and focuses of my life, shunting the prominence onto Hali. One subtle encounter with her adrenaline kisses and I was hooked. I just didn't know if I offered that same sense of rapture.

Selecting a wayward pebble as my hapless victim, I wound back my leg and propelled it ahead of me in the street. "I hope so." I answered, attempting to locate my prey amongst the rubble shielding the ground from view.

I felt Billie Joe's gaze scorch down my profile before he said, "You know. I've never seen you so bad for a girl before."

Sinking into thought, I realised that Billie Joe was right. Sure, I'd been fascinated by numerous other girls, but I'd never felt this sublime sense of infatuation that coated Hali in streams of intrigue and innocence. She was bold and bashful, desirable and dangerous, captivating and cautious in one mesh of individuality. It was almost as if I had only dragged my finger across the surface of her personality and, through the smudge, I could discern another subliminal level to everything that she did. There was always a different meaning that was probably what tempted me inexperience; the mystery that was never meant to be solved.

Releasing my trepidation in a prolonged breath, I let my head swing in pendulum mode while I tried to stem my thoughts. "I ain't been." I admitted. "It's just Hali... she's something unique. She's just... everything crammed into one person. Hybrid, you know? And she plays each role so perfectly. You never know who she's meant to be. It's so intriguing." I smiled serenely before laughing at myself and swinging my eyes up at Billie Joe. "How goofy do I sound?" I asked him, a grin snaking across my face.

"Incredibly," Billie Joe replied, mirroring my expression. "But I guess you're entitled to it."

I reduced my grin to the ground in modesty and withdrew back into my previous rhythm of scuffing the floor in absent laziness. We followed along the street in silence for a while before Billie Joe nudged me faintly. "You wanna rehearse tonight?" he asked.

"That's a stupid question." I answered, bearing my teeth in a wide grin.

Billie Joe smiled back, the corners of his eyes folding into wrinkles as he did. "It was a bit, wasn't it?" he agreed. We both knew there was nothing to scrounge for in life for us but musical inspiration. It was our saviour, however blasphemous that sounds., the solitary beacon for us to clutch onto in our exiled existence, the only thing to bind us together when almost everything tried to slash us apart. Even the one thing I'd begun to sense deeper than my passion for music.

***

I love sitting under the night sky, analysing the stars. With my head weighted against the wall, it's almost as if I'm a dew-plugged sigh from filtering limbo. It inspires a deep sense of isolation as it ignites an impassioned feeling of peace. The most effective balm for a troubled mind, it provides a canvas for you to paint your problems upon and erase them in one curbed blink.

It's one abstract therapy that has strained me out of various problems in my past almost as well as my bass has. Draining all my problems from my hassled mind and leeching them into the atmosphere. Whenever life became less of an experience and more of a complexity, I'd find my recluse in my bass and the night sky.

That's where I was during the next episode of this melancholic story; sowed underneath the stars, consumed by the world that existed in the confines of my mind. I'd just finished rehearsing with Billie Joe and Tre and had opted to go for a walk to clear my head of the onslaught of bass lines sealing my mind before I went to bed. Shunting my feet onto the pavement and my mind to ethereality, I rambled idly until I suspended my thoughts to find myself resting on the rim of the pavement opposite the Gilman. The darkening air was thickened with a gagged story that penetrated its walls. I couldn't discern the music but I could recognise the familiar pangs of teenage angst bawling to me in jagged punk boldness.

I don't know how long I sat there, my extended legs clutched close to my chest, my eyes vacantly surveying the eclipsing scene in front of me. I just reclined my head onto my knees and indulged in the truce creeping into my conflicting thoughts. My shoulders ebbed into a more relaxed position as I narrowly slipped into the cleave between alerted focus and drowsy simulation. All I know is I must have been there a while because, when I finally stole back into consciousness, my legs were numb and my arms were sore from grasping them so tightly. As I began to rub my shins viciously to ease the life and warmth back into them, I heard a hushed laugh behind me.

"That's what you get for sitting there for so long." a Welsh lilt told me with a shadow of humour underneath it.

I swivelled my position rapidly, slightly wrenching my neck as I did. Placing a hand against the subdued burning beneath my skin, I squinted into the approaching shadows to identity a figure cloaked in the night. It steadily plunged into view even though there was no need. I would have recognised her anyway in the gentle fall of her figure, in the manner she held herself, by the gradual wave of her hair.

"Hali." I breathed in shocked tones. Abruptly becoming conscious of my previous stunted dreaming, I jolted back towards the Gilman as if I expected myself to be there to reprimand. "Er... how long have you been there?" I asked, facing her again.

"Long enough to think you were a statue." Hali replied stepping beside me. She swayed her eyes to the ground before she birthed a spectral smile. "This pavement taken?"

Smiling despite my nerves at her question, I shook my head, aware she probably wouldn't see it in the condensing darkness. "No. It's open to takers."

Hali grinned openly before stooping to seat herself at my level. She shuffled her legs in gradual scrapes towards her chest and rested one cheek upon her knees to look at me. "What you doing out so late?" she asked.

I twisted my gaze away from Hali to scrutinise the Gilman for an answer. "Clearing my head." I replied.

"From what?" Hali quizzed, a shroud of concern obstructing her face.

"Musician stuff." I answered in an eager effort to purge her of her panic. It drained away only to be replaced by confusion. "I had band practise tonight. My head was too full of chords to sleep. I thought I'd walk them off." I explained.

Hali's expression softened into a small "oh" before she rested her chin on her knees, illuminating the Gilman with her gaze. "And you ended up here," she commented with progressing amusement. "At the one place music comes alive."

Letting out a slight chuckle, I nodded. "Yeah. I guess I just can't escape it." I stirred my eyes to look at Hal who was steadily becoming more distinguished in the darkness. There was a pale lustre creating a fog on her cheeks as the night breathed kisses on them and I could determine an occasional flicker of white as her teeth teased her lips in sedated sweeps. Her shoulders rolled in a steady rhythm as she breathed and her eyes were overcast with thought. "What about you?" I asked. "What you doing here?"

"I couldn't sleep." Hali replied with a monotonous tone. An unembellished sentence that divulged so much, barricading me from prying further.

Instead, I pried the floor for the answers to the questions I only asked myself. Maybe that was my problem all along. I couldn't confront the situations that I should have, too scared I would mar a flawless moment. I became the ostrich, burying my head in my own extinguished questions.

When I budged my eyes back to Hali, she had elevated her face to capture the light of the stars, reflected in her eyes. Sensing my gaze focussed on her, she smiled. "My mum used to tell me they were the angel's nightlights when I was younger, whenever I had a nightmare, and as long as they were on, I'd be all right." Her smile stumbled and faltered into a silhouetted frown. "It's all lies though, you know?" she asked me ablaze with conviction. "I mean, they're just rushes of gas. How can that protect me? They're a million lights years away. Just like everyone else I ever cared about." She released her aggravation in a jet of fermented breath. "Even my own parents." she added in disbelieving disgust.

"Don't you live with them?" I asked cautiously.

"No. I live with extended family." Hali answered with a voice tinged with bitterness.

I released my own rage in a violent sigh. I knew exactly what she meant. "Extended family". An audience-family term for a substitution, hand-me-down affection that the original one could never provide for whatever conjured reason they repeated with impassioned assurance, the certainty that cajoled them into believing they had unconditionally attempted to repair a fractured scenario.

Hali caught my silent vendetta as it charged through the air and faced me hastily, her shroud of concern transfixed onto her expression once again. "Mike." she said simply.

"Sorry," I replied, embarrassed to have let my restrained frustration downpour so badly. "It's just... I kind of know what you mean."

Hali sidled closer tome to impart and share pent-up vexation. "How'd you mean?" she pressed in a mediated tone.

About to mutter my out-dated, "It doesn't matter" excuse, I found myself trapped in Hali's gaze. Entwined closely like a prayer around her pupil, I could discern a desperate need to connect, to absorb herself into a part of society, regardless of how disjointed it was. The desire not to be alone any longer.

"I was adopted," I began to explain. "When I was still a baby. My real mum couldn't handle me so she turned me in like some wayward package to clear her conscience. I managed to get placed in a good home but things got a bit sour a few years ago and we sort of dissolved. My mum tried to struggle on but it was just working against us so she had to move. I stayed behind to live with one of my friends to try and build a life out of the jigsaw left around me."

Hali released a trembled breath. "And I thought I had it bad." she murmured gently. She seized my hand with determined optimism. "But at least you have your music."

I nodded with a slivered smile across my face. "Yeah. There's always that."

Hali smiled at my attempted positivity. She untwined her hand from mine to trail a finger down my cheek and across my jaw line. "And there's bound to be happiness waiting to leap out at you." she declared with a passion that drew my eyes to meet hers. Her palm came to rest flat against my cheek as her eyes burned with hope. She brought her lips until the quivered teasingly before mine. I could feel her breath land on my lips in those split seconds that I attempted to suppress the temptation before it overpowered me and our lips connected in trembling tenderness.

It was only something simple, a second-lasting display of affection and connection but, in that compact moment, I found myself surrendering control to her. In that rapid exchange, she implanted her hope into me and I gave her my menial life. Even with these accumulated years between us, my movements are still dictated by her. How strong my passion for her rages, how much I miss her determine whether I progress with life or just illusions in my mind.

When she pulled away, Hali's eyes lighted upon the floor. With a timid smile, she peered through her eyelashes at me. I cast her smile back to her before a violent yelp of a distressed cat severed the moment and the connection between us.

Hali placed a hand to her chest to restrain her dread-instilled heartbeat with a fluttered laugh. She turned back to me with her lips pressed together until they were dyed white. As she slowly released them from their compression, Hali fixed me with an expression moulded from affection and disappointment. As the doors to the Gilman spewed the under-life back into reality, Hali lurched upwards saying, "I'd better be going."

"I'll walk you home." I announced as I eased myself up beside her.

Hali gave a silent laugh. "It's all right, Mike. I can walk myself home." As I opened my mouth to protest, Hali sealed the gap with her finger. "Yes, I'm sure," she answered with her eyes twinkling in amusement. "You just get back home." Hali traced her finger down my lips ad paused. In a flutter of indecision, she stepped forward to kiss me faintly. "Bye."

"Bye." I echoed and, for the second time in my life, I watched Hali be consumed by the shadows as I wished there would be more moments to come.