I had always loved the silent parts of songs. The breath a singer takes before the chorus swells, the moment of absolute stillness in an orchestral piece where you can feel the next note hanging in the air, pregnant with everything it has yet to say. That was why I could never find the moment for love with Darcy, no matter how hard we tried to follow the script.
We were on his sofa, a fortress of faded corduroy, drowning in a sea of popcorn bowls. The credits of Before Sunrise were rolling, that beautiful, aching acoustic melody wrapping around the ghost of Vienna. My throat was tight, a familiar, hollow ache behind my eyes. I had cried when I’d watched it alone last week, wept silently for the perfection of a connection that existed for one night, crystallised forever in its potential.
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“See?” Darcy said, nudging my foot with his. He had that look on his face—part triumph, part tender concern. “The bit where they’re in the listening booth. That’s the moment. You feel it, right?”
I didn’t. I’d missed it. Again. I’d been watching the images, hearing the songs, but my mind was a spectator in its own theatre, analysing the camera angle on Celine’s shy smile, wondering about the actor’s process, getting utterly lost in the haunting piano line. The emotional crescendo, the part where you’re supposed to let the feeling flood you, passed by like a bus I’d forgotten to hail.
“I think I blinked,” I said, my voice softer than I intended.
Darcy laughed, a warm, generous sound. He stretched, his t-shirt riding up. “That’s the problem. You’re overthinking. We need to… embody it. Not just watch it.”
“Embody it?”
“Yeah. Copy it. The moves.” He sat up, energized. “Like… okay, remember the dance scene in Punch-Drunk Love? The chaotic, awkward one in the warehouse? We could do that. Or the running-through-the-airport finale. The grand, desperate confession in the rain. We find the moves, and the feeling follows. It’s method acting for romance.”
I looked at him—his earnest, handsome face, so eager to build a bridge to a country I seemed unable to locate on any map. A sadness, sweet and heavy, settled in my ribs. He wanted a blueprint, and I kept giving him a blank page with only a faint, indecipherable melody scribbled in the corner.
“People can either mirror the action,” I said, thinking aloud, “or be the loudspeaker for it. You know? The thing that amplifies the real, quiet signal. I think… I think I tend to be more of a loudspeaker.” It was the closest I could come to an explanation. I felt things, deeply, but they arrived as vibrations, as resonances, not as actions to be performed. My tears were a private frequency.
Darcy, of course, loved this idea. It became our project. Our next movie night was Amélie. Before the opening sequence was over, he was pulling me up, trying to get me to skip stones at the duck pond in the park the next day, narrating my life in a whimsical French accent. It was endearing. It was hilarious. It felt, to me, like we were building a beautiful, elaborate set for a play that kept getting postponed. The props were perfect—the quirky postcards, the mysterious photobooth strips, the sugar bowl we stole from a diner. But the heart of the story, the silent, seismic shift when Amélie finally knocks on Nino’s door… that curtain never rose for me.
He was at his most fervent with Say Anything. He stood outside my apartment building one drizzly Tuesday evening, a battered boombox held over his head, playing Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” My neighbours stared. I wanted to sink into the earth. Not from embarrassment, but from a profound sense of fraudulence. I came down, took the boombox, and pulled him inside. “You’ll get pneumonia,” I said. He was beaming, wet hair plastered to his forehead, convinced he’d nailed the moment.
“Did you feel it?” he asked, breathless, in my hallway.
I felt the cold damp of his jacket. I felt the overwhelming, crushing weight of his expectation. I felt the sublime, tragic beauty of the song, which, in the context of our performance, now felt like a parody. “It was very loud,” I said, and kissed his cheek, which tasted of rain and disappointment.
It was after the boombox incident that my thoughts turned, not for the first time, to Bensimon. Bensimon, who existed in my life like a deep, grounding bass note. He was a composer, my oldest friend, the one who understood that my soul was wired to sound. We’d sit for hours in his cluttered studio, him tinkering with synth layers, me reading, the air a tapestry of half-born ideas.
Once, after a particularly confusing non-date with Darcy involving a reenactment of the spaghetti meatball scene from Lady and the Tramp, I’d gone to Bensimon’s. I was a tumult of frustration.
“It’s like I’m colour-blind to the emotion everyone else sees,” I’d confessed, staring at the spectral analyser on his computer screen, a rolling landscape of sonic colour. “I see the composition. I see the lighting, the blocking, the symbolism. I hear the leitmotif. But the feeling… it’s like it’s on a track I can’t access when he’s there.”
Bensimon had stopped fiddling with a keyboard, his hands stilling. He looked at me, not with Darcy’s passionate problem-solving, but with a quiet, knowing clarity. “Bee,” he’d said (only he ever called me Bee), “have you ever considered that maybe it’s not the story you’re in love with?”
“What do you mean?”
He’d gestured to the screen, to the soaring violin line he’d just composed. “You just described the soundtrack. The leitmotif. The breath before the chorus. Maybe that is the feeling for you. Maybe you don’t cry at the lovers reuniting; you cry at the cello that swells when they see each other. You’re not in love with the kiss; you’re in love with the silence right before it.” He’d shrugged, as if stating a simple, evident fact. “It really is the soundtrack, and not the story, that you’re in love with.”
The truth of it had hit me with the force of a perfectly resolved chord. It hummed in my bones for days. It explained everything—why Darcy’s faithful recreations left me cold. He was acting out the story. I was waiting, always waiting, for the soundtrack to cue me. And real life, our life, had no score. It had the rustle of popcorn, the hum of the fridge, the traffic outside. Our kisses happened in dead air, not in the resonant silence between two perfect notes.
The end, when it came, was not a grand, cinematic rupture. It was a quiet fading out.
We were attempting The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Darcy was trying to infuse our mundane trip to the supermarket with a tragic, sung-through operatic quality. “I need… the olive oiiiiil… the extra vir-giiiin…” he crooned in the aisle, earning a baffled look from a man comparing pasta brands.
I didn’t laugh. I just watched him, this beautiful, silly, earnest man trying so desperately to score our relationship, to force the symphony to start. And I heard, not his off-key singing, but Bensimon’s voice. It’s the soundtrack.
“Darcy,” I said, my voice cutting through his improvised aria about wholemeal bread. “Stop.”
He stopped. The ordinary supermarket sounds rushed back in—the beep of scanners, the rattle of carts, the tinny store music. It was brutally, nakedly real.
“I can’t do this anymore,” I said. “I can’t audition for the lead in a romance I can’t feel.”
He looked stricken. “But the moves… we just need to find the right movie. The Notebook! The rain scene, I could—”
“No,” I said, the word final and soft. “You’re searching for the perfect scene. I’m waiting for a score that isn’t there. We’re not even in the same genre.”
There were no tears, not then. Not in the canned vegetable aisle. There was just a profound, echoing silence. The kind of silence that isn’t empty, but full of everything that is ending.
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and then Add to home screen.