If I Fell

Chapter Six

Absentmindedly I chewed slightly on the nail of my pinky finger, having all my focus centered on the iPod on the counter top in front of me.

I’d been given it years ago, but I’d put in a drawer and hadn’t seen it since.

After a slight argument with my computer – it hadn’t been pretty – I’d managed to put music onto it, and I kept adding more with every passing day. There was just so much to discover. If it wasn’t so exciting when I felt that thrill in the pit of my stomach as if I’d just missed a stair every time I found a new band to listen to, it would be plenty daunting. I had decades of music to catch up on.

Yeah… it was still pretty daunting.

At the moment I had a band named The Pixies playing their song Where Is My Mind. It was giving me the overwhelming urge to sway even if that would end up to be bloody dangerous with my position of being perched on top of the black stool that stood at the kitchen’s breakfast bar.

The Pixies were my newest musical find and I was already listening to them constantly. The day before it had been Dire Straits, but as much as I could listen to every song for what seemed like years in my head, I couldn’t help myself when I found a new band. And suddenly I wanted to nothing more than listen to every song they’d ever produced.

There seemed to be no kind of pattern in the way that I discovered these new songs and bands. I jumped through decades and genres without any reason, and, sure, I accidently stumbled on songs that Marcy would have liked to play in her car, but soon enough I was back where I wanted.

Why hadn’t anyone told me there was an entire different world?

Because that was what this felt like, as if I’d gone through my entire life with a wall built between the stuff my friends listened to and… this. It wasn’t the same thing; I could swear on it, it was different.

But at that moment the wire of the headphone I had stuffed in my ear was yanked, making me jump at the sudden return to reality.

Looking up wide-eyed, I stared at the perpetrator of the crime. It wasn’t so much the taking away of the headphones, because I slowly removed the other, but the shock of coming to the present time. I’d been so completely wrapped up in the songs I’d been listening to that I hadn’t even noticed time passing, I probably could have sat on the stool quite happily for the next couple hours – or at least until my butt got sore.

My mom was looking at me with raised eyebrows, turned slightly towards me on her own stool right beside me.

“Oh, sorry,” I murmured my apology, folding up the headphones neatly on the counter.

She stared at me for a long moment, and since I didn’t like the calculated expression I could see underneath her librarian glasses, I quickly turned my gaze away, looking away to the window that was over top of the sink. The view offered no more than a distant shot of green and the beginning of our neighbour’s house that was situated a fair bit away, but it was a more pleasurable sight at the moment.

“Your tea is getting cold,” my mom informed me.

Surprised I blinked down to find that she was in fact right, and my once steaming glass of tea had been left forgotten on the counter top. Picking it up, I cautiously took a sip but it was at least still lukewarm.

“I bought that for you years ago,” she observed, looking down at her newspaper, “Why are you using it now?”

I gave a shrug, focusing down on my tea. For all I knew my mother had never listened to music in her life besides the stuff that played in the background of those snooty fundraisers and parties she forced me to, so it wasn’t exactly something I could explain to her. “I just figured out how to use it,” I told her – that wasn’t really a lie; it just wasn’t the entire truth.