Home Note

There's a reason that home is where the hearth is, for leaving it is entering the cold. Like gravity, the warmth decays inversely with the square of the distance. And the road to atonality seems adventurous at first.

We are warm-blooded beasts, we are, and we embrace the calor of hunkering down. We cozy to the beauty of love. As I distance myself from home—my hearth—I grow in unnatural ways. When going hearthless I am growing heartless. Linguistic ironies arise from merely one letter's difference. Thus, it is a spell.

I adventure through extramural sounds of the harsh winds that outshout the harmonies of home's protection. The lush tones of family and home, whereas before having circled my brain like a playful earworm, now circle my drain, instead. As I walk further, my half-cup-full drains to half-empty. Surely a saving refrain will come back around. I listen for it. But is hearthless being tone deaf?

Far away from where I belong, my withdrawal discharges tonality, in lieu of alighting on a discordant score. A foreign strain, unlike my song. Unlike the warmth of my original melody which had flickered so warmly to illuminate my soul.

I defy the accruing dissonance that screeches and grates and takes me to crescendos that might wash me away.

Fleeing home I travel the Staff, the horizontal lines and spaces that chitter musical pitches as I step on the cracks that break my mother's back and, in doing so, sound each crippling note.

Yet, in doing so, I garner the sounds of the world.

Isn't that what I had wanted? Isn't that why I had left the hearth, to seek other types of warmth elsewhere. I am writing my own life away from home, composing my own symphony, harvesting my bespoke tones.

Away from the home note of my former home and my original anthem. And all that glitters is not warm.

My steps along the Staff are missteps, as I'm attracted to a dark backbeat brewing: B-to-F, one fourth at a time. I reach for—feel for—strains I hope to be beautiful. I pluck at the air, but the air tastes fetid. I grasp for harmonic refrains, but all I do is tear away my music book's pages. For augmented tritones vie for my song.

The score becomes unsettling, and I am on a stage where I am singing alone. Finally, I find it necessary to gauge the notes that terrify me: augmented tritones vie for my song and, against such strains, I wage my brave fugue. Alas, I cannot make it work musically, and this forces me to abandon all melodic sense.

Instead, I hear it come for me, stalk me, wafting seductively; but it is alien and unfriendly.

F-from-B, the tritone, the devil himself, and all his temptations and pomps—and circumstances. He glares discordantly along my measures...as I get farther away from home and further away from hearth.

And it is so cold out here! The music sounds tinny.

Abroad, I find that my melody rots; my song spoils. I wretch at what I thought I could savor, but instead gag on the song I belch. It waxes fortissimo. I hold my hands over my ears, but the performance is my own; and inescapably in my own head.

Away from the hearth, the home note, and the home that is both. What was I thinking?

I must return to seek home's note—my home note—if I'm to avoid my cruel finale. The curtains. The empty auditorium.

I turn and listen to where I need return. Honing in, I once again recognize the familiar, but its doors are locked like I had left them. So, I reach for the key. The right key.

The tumblers align like the rich harmonies that fall together to gain me entrance. Then, finding myself at the hearth again, I can feel the glowing of the embers that play on for me. The hearth renders the heart. It was a quintet of four; a quartet of three; and on and on; but I provide the tenor.

Mine, I now realize, was a giving song, granting me forgiveness for the shrill cacophony I had played away from the hearth, apart from the heart—a song plucked with slings and arrows. And with stupid, clumsy fingers.

My prodigal melody disarms the tension and, anticipated again, my percussing hammer uncocks, bathing me in respite, resolving all worldly tensions:

The home note.

The lush, full, dripping sweetness of the hearth, whose sound, otherwise, had faded inversely with the square of the distance. Like warmth. Like heartbeats. Like home. But joy! I can see the truth as clearly as I hear the sounds of home. And as warmly as I bask in the hearth. My heart sings again.

Beautiful music indeed!