The Symphonies That You Are (Seastone Seasons #3)

Prelude

ALEX

I never found out whether the problem was my brain or my ears, but one thing was clear: one or the other didn’t process sound the same way as it did for everyone else.

For as long as I could remember, every sound I heard demanded my attention, as if it were the only one in the world.

That wouldn’t be a problem in itself if there weren’t so many competing noises fighting for my limited attention.

My first real realization of this came a few days before my sixth birthday.

My mom brought home a new set of dinnerware.

She had talked about buying it for months, so when the day finally came, she prepared a special three-course dinner for the two of us so we could break in all six plates in one memorable meal.

All of the dishes were made of the same white porcelain.

They were all the same size, with a flower pattern printed in the center.

One thing my five-year-old brain noticed, though, was that none of them sounded alike when we set the table.

The first one clanked against the tabletop as if it hated being in our kitchen.

The second one reverberated so strongly that it seemed ready to hurt me if I looked at it wrong.

But the sound of the third one changed my life.

When it met the wooden surface, it produced a warm ring so pleasing that, for the first time ever, it drowned out every other sound.

From then on, I insisted on using that plate for every meal. My mom thought I was crazy, and I thought the same about her. She insisted that all of the dishes were the same. When I pointed out how different they sounded, she made a face as if an alien had replaced her son.

The next day, I complained so much about her serving food on one of the “mean” plates that she put me in charge of setting the table—a job I happily took on.

It wasn’t until I started school later that year that my hearing became a real problem.

Before then, I had spent most of my time inside our apartment, which shielded me well enough from outside noise.

Now I was in a building full of the brashest, most earsplitting people five days a week, and I could hear everything: every playful scream, every whisper, every cry when someone stumbled over their own feet.

Once I learned the patterns of their footsteps, I could tell which teacher was coming around the corner.

I could tell which of my classmates was having a hard time concentrating by the way they breathed, even if they were sitting on the other side of the room.

I could even tell what song was playing in the music room down the hall.

Sounds that other people tuned out, like breathing, the hum of the air conditioner, or cars passing by, were always present to me.

That was when the headaches began. As soon as I stepped outside the apartment, a throbbing pain shot through my head, making it impossible to concentrate.

It only subsided when I got home. As a result, my grades were terrible.

My mom was called into school several times.

At first, they asked if I had been bullied.

But when I tried to explain, no one would listen.

They got so frustrated when I wouldn’t budge from my story that they started scolding me.

“You don’t want to become a problem,” my principal said.

Things only changed when one of my mom’s boyfriends moved in, halfway through first grade.

I don’t remember his name, but I liked him because he always had headaches, too.

One Thursday night after dinner, he joined me in the living room.

He sat me down in front of his CD collection and put a pair of headphones over my ears.

I still remember his words: “Promise me you won’t take ‘em off until I get back, and you can listen to every single one of my CDs.”

The guitar-heavy songs were an epiphany.

I was consumed by the music. The world around me disappeared.

It was just me and the rhythm of whatever was playing.

There were no neighbors walking upstairs, no hammering in Mom’s bedroom, and no planes flying over the apartment complex.

Compared to the rest of the world, the music was structured and offered me a kind of peace unlike anything I had ever experienced.

With the headphones on, life suddenly became harmonious.

I slept like a baby that night. The music was still playing on repeat when Mom woke me up for school the next morning.

That gave me an idea. I hid the headphones and the portable CD player in my bag, took them to school, and didn’t think twice about the fact that everyone would notice them on my head.

Of course, my teacher scolded me when she saw them.

She made me take them off amid my classmates’ laughter.

But that didn’t stop me from forming a plan.

I started doing my homework and studying for tests while listening to music.

For the first time, I could concentrate easily, and what I learned actually stuck.

Two weeks later, I received my first B, the best grade I had ever gotten.

My mom praised me. A week after that, I got my first A, and she praised me even more.

Every night after dinner, Mom’s boyfriend would tell me to put my headphones on as he and Mom went to bed.

As if I would have taken them off on my own.

I would have kept them on all the time if wearing them to school or during dinner hadn’t gotten me in trouble.

Because I had finally found an answer to my problem.

Around that time, I also started singing to myself.

Whenever I couldn’t listen to music, I made my own.

I wasn’t a good singer, but it helped me stay focused.

Soon, I realized there were even more options.

I started sneaking into the music room during breaks to play the piano.

I didn’t know what I was doing, but the sweet sound of the instrument soothed me more than my own rough voice ever could.

One day, a teacher caught me, but instead of scolding me, he listened as I played. Then he smiled and offered to talk to my mom about it.

Before long, that teacher became a frequent visitor to our home.

He gave me a small piano keyboard to practice on, and within a week, composing my own music had become my entire world.

The keyboard was predictable. Every note I played always sounded the same.

My teacher even offered to cover the costs of piano lessons.

Mom quickly signed me up for two hours every afternoon.

I learned to think of the world’s noise as music, which helped me understand why certain sounds bothered me more than others.

People, animals, and objects all make sounds at different pitches.

Some were perfectly harmonious, while most clashed so intensely that they hurt my head.

I learned to cherish even that. They still gave me headaches, but thanks to my growing skill, I could now play the sound my favorite plate made on my piano.

I composed my first song. It was about Mom setting the table—a discordant shanty, but at least more organized and predictable than she was.

This became my thing.

Whenever I couldn’t wear my headphones, I would listen to the sounds and patterns around me, and when I got home, I would turn them into music.

The song of my classmates taking a test. The song of the old lady upstairs doing her laundry.

The song of a dog peeing against a streetlight.

The song of my teacher and my mom’s boyfriend yelling at each other.

The song of my mom crying at night. The song of my mom’s new boyfriend.

The song of blowing out candles at my eighteenth birthday party.

The song of my first kiss with the boy from the laundromat.

The song of my first college lecture on sound design in film.

The song of becoming a sophomore. The song of my mom’s wedding.

The song of my stepdad catching me kissing my boyfriend behind the house.

The song of my clothes being thrown out the window.

The song of my mom not answering my calls.

The song of sleeping on a park bench. The song of being turned away from class because the checks bounced.

The song of my empty stomach grumbling. The song of searching for jobs.

The song of the couple who offered me a roof over my head in exchange for helping them around the house.

The song of hitchhiking to a small mountain town. The song of Seastone.