Maggie Huang (9) | STAFF REPORTER
It’s almost 7 pm now, I’m lucky it hasn’t rained yet. I could always tell when it was about to rain; all the sounds would start to sing in a baritone voice. It’s ridiculous how they change the entire mood of a city.
The streets were quieter now, only a few people were still outside making their way home. Traffic lights shone beams of colour into the streets as the sun slowly made its way under the bridge. Sunset blossoms faded into the clouds as sweet as wild clover blooms, as a settled heart to the horizon… as if the sky itself could speak of love.
It’s hard to describe such a feeling when you’re enjoying it alone.
Deciding that it was time to go, I quickly slipped Rael into his case and picked up my pitiful amount of belongings from the grey concrete. I looked down and shovelled around in my begging bowl, counting the coins my music brought me today. Under a few five-dollar bills, silver nickels and toonies clinked together. At the bottom of the bowl, I notice one is a copper coin.
Through the striking green that spread over its surface, I made out the words “Look Up.”
When I slowly glanced back up, I catch sight of a man standing in my path. I shuffled my feet uncomfortably, getting this eerie feeling that someone had been watching me all day. He was wearing a long dark jacket with golden buttons along the sleeves. Seeing that I had noticed him, he began to strut forward toward me.
I felt the colour drain from my face. Who was this person, and what gave him the audacity to approach a street dweller like me? My heart pounded against my ribs, and a gust of emotion hit me in the gut. I felt so many things, so many things that could go wrong. But I didn’t move, I didn’t run, not this time.
Before one second and the next, I was drowning in the dark of my own thoughts. Before one second and the next, the pain had finally caught up to me. There were days my brain felt tired, so violently defocused and the pain, the emotional pain, was so all-encompassing I simply existed as a matter of willpower. They say you come out of these things alone, which is true I guess. But then I realized that I was never alone, I always had my guitar, my own sound in a world full of them.
And before one second and the next, the man was standing next to me.
My grasp around Rael tightened.
The first thing he said was,
“Nice guitar you got there, I love your music.”
