![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hsavinien By H.Savinien
He’s beautiful. I don’t know if you’d see it, looking at him. His face is nothing spectacular, pictures of him are interesting, but not mesmerizing. I can see it, though. That’s why, every time I can scrape together the money, I go to the symphony. It doesn’t matter what’s playing. It matters even less if I’ll be living on ramen noodles and cold cereal for the next two weeks. The dress clothes—my suit jacket, slacks, shirt, tie—are the last things I’d ever pawn. I’ve got to have them.
I go to see him, not just to hear the music. He’s beautiful. His arms, his back, the way he moves, the way the jacket of his tuxedo, stage-lights illuminating every fold, slides across the muscles of his back. You’ve got to see him move to see how beautiful he really is. He lives the music. He touches it, draws it out of the musicians, shapes it in ways the composers could only dream of. He is the music.
Tonight, I get to see him. Front row seat, right in the middle. Closest to him I’ve ever been. The usher hands out programs. I take one from her absentmindedly, stepping across the threshold into red velvet and gilded wood. Down the aisle, shining black shoes scuffing new patterns in the knap of the thick carpeting. At the front, my right sleeve brushing the edge of the stage, I slip awkwardly past the few early arrivals already seated in the front row. I sit, glance at the program. Tchaikovsky tonight—selections from the Firebird and Nutcracker Suites. Classic. One hundred and twenty minutes of the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, five feet in front of me.
There are percussionists in the back, rearranging drums, bells, and oddly shaped conglomerations of wood and metal. Twenty minutes before seven. I adjust my cuffs, which ride up my wrists a little. Not too noticeable yet. My doctor said I would stop growing around eighteen, but that was four years ago, and I swear I had a growth spurt this fall. I’m 6’2” already. I don’t need any more height on me. My watch says fifteen minutes to seven. The low brass and strings are filing on, adjusting music and chairs. A scattering of stage lights sparkle off of trumpets and woodwinds entering from the left. Flutes and bassoons, violins and timpani, swirl and bang and screech as they warm up. One long note from the first clarinet tunes the winds, another for the brass. The strings join in, plucking softly, pausing to adjust, then plucking again. Five minutes to seven. A stagehand crosses to adjust the lone music stand in the center of the stage. There is a flutter and an ache deep in my stomach. There go the house lights. The theater is completely dark, completely quiet for a fraction of a second before the stage lights come up.
He’s standing in front of me. His dark eyes shine in the stage lights as he looks out over the audience. His gaze sweeps the farthest corners of the balcony before resting on me for a moment.
“Welcome.”
Just the one word, and he turns, raises his arms, and captures my heart again. The music soars out from the stage and he is in the middle of it—creating it, living it, dancing it without moving from one place.
How can musicians believe that they produce beauty? They make noise. He turns it into beauty. He is the catalyst, the channel, the avatar that produces heaven’s chorus from earth.
He is beautiful.
Concrit and comments welcomed, as always.
*Editted per suggestion.
