Jill Malone

Writing about music is tricky, and I’m not sure how well I’m managing. Paste Magazine writes smart, dynamic reviews, using vibrant language that wants to be read aloud, but sometimes I don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. Bright confusion in a paragraph can be fun, but in a novel, not so much.  The effect of music is subjective, and rendering an appreciation without being self-conscious or circular or muddy is the task.

And then, writing about a performance of music—from the perspective of a 16 year old—is particularly challenging.  It feels like there isn’t enough language for it.  And I don’t want to overburden metaphor.  And I don’t want to be redundant.

I like this part—the struggle of expression—the search for a description that captures the animal.

The power in our neighborhood went out last night.  Even the streetlights.  It was not an eerie dark, probably because it’s summer, but certainly an all-consuming dark.  No hum of electronics, no murmur of fans.  Street noise, and the dogs tiptoeing through the apartment.

I’d been reading, and had to finish the novel using my camping headlamp.  And somehow, I felt happier than I have for days.  More rested.  Calmer.  The silence perhaps or the unyielding dark.  And I wanted to tell you.  I wanted to share the solace of it with you.

During junior high, I began sneaking out at night.  Sometimes just to walk around.  It freaked me out a little, the dark, and the wind through the trees, and the lean of shadows.  All the world asleep except a prowling girl.  In Hawaii for high school, the night even lovelier than the day, whole groups of us met at midnight or 2 a.m., and went to the beach or to parks.  We never considered the danger of it.  The best nights were the ones in which nothing happened.  No drinking or recklessness.  We’d lie on our backs and stare at the sky and tell stories.  We’d invent all that was to come.  The ceaseless adventures awaiting us, mere months away really, since most of us were seventeen.

Of course we were caught once or twice, revealed by gas levels in the cars, or the occasional insomniac parent.  I remember those nights as a kind of twilight between the school girl and the unknown woman.  We weren’t wild kids.  No vandalism or drug use.  A small rebellion, to do at night almost exactly what we did during summer days.  Sometimes we swam.  Dropped into the dark water, and spooked one another with shrieks about rocks shaped like sea creatures.  The water pulling at us.  Fingers of seaweed grasping our legs.  The delicious terror of all we didn’t know.