—Le Chant des Oiseaux
Soundtrack #6: Folie à Deux (REMIX)
There it is: my gleaming coat of armour. The armour I fought in. Died in. Every so often, I drift here to visit it. A simple moment is all I need to relive that past. It only found it perchance, really. I was sojourning through Boston, MA, stopping here and there upon finding others like myself. The others who are caught in that flimsy membrane between the living and the dead; spirits, specters, ghosts. At the time, I was on a kick helping out those I could, helping them cross over. Who said chivalry is dead? Well, I guess technically it is. Semantics. In any event, my ephemeral travels suddenly took on a vastly different color the moment I saw this place. A hotel, I think the contemporaries call them. We certainly didn’t have them like this five hundred years ago, in the Tudor England of my home. Thatched roofs and wattle and daub walls are certainly a thing of the past. Yet there it was. A castle, in the middle of Framingham. No ordinary castle, but one of those picturesque, impervious fortresses in the lush fields of rural Scotland, those kind of castles where I grew up. Where I trained many long days in the keep in order to enter knighthood. Where I lived, where I loved, and where I died. Over the heavy, bolted doors to the lobby hung a decorative coat of arms. The crest is not one I recognize. The facade even had fashionable turrets of heavy stone that loom over the adjacent highway, keeping guard. Although, I can’t imagine what wars are waged here. If those people down there with their totes of luggage scurrying to their slumber knew the violence and illness that truly pervaded castles such as these, would they still stay?
Today though, I now realize this is just an imitation to entertain the fellows that travel through here looking for lodging. Out front, a bus of young students is gathering their things, undoubtedly to stay here. In a flash, so quickly I’m not even sure I heard it, my otherworldy ears recognize a favourite tune from my past, Le Chant des Oiseaux. As a supernatural entity, my senses are heightened, my faculties of empathy are magnified, among many other things. I float through the front doors, my diaphanous body passing through with ease. In the lobby, I find students shuffling by, carrying various suitcases and oddly shaped cases, presumably filled with musical instruments of sorts. Over by my brilliant armour, there is a young man, staring intently. I tune into his emotional wavelength. Well. That’s certainly not what I expected. Nostalgia. There’s more though. He’s thinking about Oliver Cromwell. Vivaldi’s Cantabile and Handel’s Larghetto sound through his ears into mine. This is most unusual. And just like that, with a solid, gentle closing of the elevator doors, his nostalgia is gone. I was under the impression, despite this building’s duplicitous masquerade act of Tudor England, that the life of my past was dead. Did anyone yearn for that time, as much as I yearn for release from this wicked prison of in-between-consciousness? This random boy’s nostalgia: for a moment, he was there. He might as well have gone off to the haberdashery or apothecary afterwards.
I believe it now: nothing lasts, but nothing is lost …
