The old guitar sat plain and worn across Rev’s folded legs. It was a curled-up cat ready to nap away another morning in easy sun-pooled bliss.
Rev nodded as he leaned and reached back up over his head to shut down two spinning decks. He listened as archaic spools completed their routines of clunky arcs and slowed as one to a perfect standstill.
Then he nodded again, still to himself, and wondered if it could be true: Had he really just finished recording the musical basis for the last of his fragmentary songs?
How? Why now?
And without added pressures of creaking tape wheels or flashing red lights, he strummed and ambled his way back through a final set of sliding chords, humming wordlessly along.
What he felt was not the sense of having solved some epic equation, nor of having strived to build some new and monumental work. The notes he heard calling out through the wood had never really been decided upon. He had merely spent years hoping to approach . . . before finally picking up on and allowing himself to follow . . . that which now could only be just as it was.
He remembered having wanted to call the song Fantastic for some reason.
The room and sun went cold. Guitar sound clipped to dead, robotic noise.
He stopped.
The name Fantastic had nothing to do with the clumsily jotted, throwaway words now mocking him from down where blank light shone upon an open notebook page. Meaningless, each line had been recorded without thinking.
In the newly somber void of sound, names and lyrics suddenly seemed so, so important again.
Familiar flutters of nervous energy shivered in blotches through his chest, spine, and throat.
He detested the useless options he now faced. Always the same…
He might tweak and reframe his scribbled nonsense to mold something uniquely vague. This would feel like working hard to tell an inside joke, yet one no one else could ever understand.
Perhaps such words would fit his music best.
Still, all spacy hintings had come to feel at least as pointless and passé as attempts at fishing for or manufacturing more blunt and obvious meanings. And Rev’s intentional creations had all grown stark and bland like apples quickly browning in the wind, usually by the second time he heard himself sing them back.
Could fans interpret songs their own way if the words were left open enough?
Fans… There I go again.
Inward monologues spun themselves into textbook conversations on sorting trash.
Rev’s somewhat (almost) sober mind recoiled with fresh tenacity. It was a new and ugly sharpness, which he couldn’t help but hate.
No, nothing was finished. His freshly captured oldest friends were but more mute prophets born to laugh at fate.
Whatever.
I don't know anything 