where silence and sound collide
how jazz shapes the stories we tell
lately, the writing has been different.
less linear, more like breath.
more like the way a horn curves around a memory it refuses to name.
i’ve been torn between writing in lower case (as i always do on text) vs. following protocol-
but it seems only right recently.
last night, i wrote an essay and a prose about a painting from 1864.
i don’t always mean to write about jazz, but it keeps showing up-
in the spaces between lovers who never touch,
in the ache of restraint,
in the long, low notes of being alone but not quite lonely.
jazz is where i go when language fails but feeling doesn’t.
it’s not a theme.
it’s a frequency.
and lately, everything that haunts or heals me moves to its tempo.
my metaphors have grown horns, drum beats, and brushed cymbals.
my heartbreaks echo like coltrane in a cathedral.
my silences swing, and gyrate instead.
this isn’t a pivot.
that word “pivot” makes me cringe-
reminds me of post-covid days when everyone needed to turn clockwise.
let's use the word modulate instead.
it’s a return.
to the unspeakable.
to syncopation.
to that sacred, syncopated center where longing improvises its own survival.
so if the essays sound a little different now-
if they feel more like solos,
more like séances,
conjurings,
reverberations-
it’s because they are.
i’m just trying to write what the music inside me is already playing.
stay close.
i think the the downbeat’s coming.
for now,
there is lee.
