Through the Wall
"She hears him playing oud through the wall every night—beautiful, melancholy music she can't ignore. When she finally knocks to complain, he opens the door, and she realizes she doesn't want him to stop playing. She wants him to play for her."
Every night at 10 PM, the music starts.
Oud through the wall. Beautiful and sad and keeping me awake. I should complain. I should be furious.
Instead, I fall asleep to it.
For three months.
Tonight, I knock.
Not to complain—to meet the person making that sound. To understand how anyone can play with so much feeling.
He opens the door.
Young. My age. Eyes that look like they've seen too much.
"The music?" he asks.
"The music." I pause. "It's beautiful."
His name is Abdi.
He plays oud because his father taught him, and his father is gone now, and the music is the closest thing to having him back.
"I'm sorry if it's too loud," he says.
"It's not." I sit on his couch, surrounded by instruments and sheet music. "It's exactly what I need to hear."
"Why?"
"Because you play with honesty." I look at him. "Everything else in my life feels fake. Your music doesn't."
He plays for me.
Just us in his flat, his hands on the strings, notes filling the space between us. I watch his face—the concentration, the pain, the release.
When he finishes, I'm crying.
"I'm sorry—" I wipe my eyes. "That was—"
"What did it make you feel?"
"Everything." I look at him. "Everything I've been trying not to feel."
"Then it worked." He sets down the oud. "Music is supposed to unlock things."
"What does it unlock for you?"
"Loneliness." He meets my eyes. "Until now."
"I should go."
"Should you?"
"It's midnight."
"And you came here to complain about noise." He stands. Walks toward me. "But you haven't complained."
"I don't want to complain."
"What do you want?"
"I want—" I can't say it. Can barely think it. "I want to stay."
"Then stay."
He kisses me in his music-filled flat.
The oud on the floor beside us, the memory of notes still hanging in the air. Everything about this is unexpected.
Everything about this is right.
"Abdi—"
"I play to feel less alone." He undresses me slowly. "But you're here now. And I don't feel alone."
We make love with the oud as witness.
His musician's hands learn my body like learning a song—finding the notes that make me gasp, the rhythm that makes me move.
"You're beautiful—"
"Play me—" I don't know why I say it, but I do. "The way you play the oud. That's how I want you to touch me."
He does.
After, he picks up the oud.
Plays something new—something lighter, happier. Something that sounds like beginnings instead of endings.
"What's that?" I ask.
"I don't know yet." He smiles. "I'm writing it for you."
He plays for me every night.
Not through the wall anymore—in his flat, with me beside him. The melancholy is still there, but now there's something else too.
Hope.
"Marry me," he says a year later, oud in his lap.
"Play me something first."
He plays the song he wrote that first night. The one about beginnings.
"That's a yes," I say when he finishes.
"That's forever."
He plays me through the rest of our lives.
And I never want the music to stop.