Sometimes, on sleepless nights, Aisling remembers that bustling city. Not as the run-of-the-mill metropolis she lives in now, but as that glamorous place--the place where hungry-hearted people scavenge for dreams, where city lights dazzle one's eyelids, where one cannot tell night from day. She remembers it because it is there that she herself has desperately scavenged for something too.

The cafe she used to work in has glass windows and outdoor seating, where nameless people sit and while away the hours. When the sky turns a velvety black, its warm yellow light illuminates the pavement outside.

She recalls the ivory-white and ebony-black keys of the piano there, and the clear, silver notes ringing through the room as her fingers dance across them. She remembers seeing nothing but black and white, black and white, for hours on end, sometimes feeling the room spin in time with her music. Disconnected images would flicker in her mind and dance at her fingertips as she played: the way sunlight had shone in the town she used to live in, that wooden fence that she had once so longed to step over. The summer air that had seemed to both energise and drain her.

Perhaps, she sometimes thought, amongst the crowds of nameless, faceless people, there was one person who might possibly come again, not for the food nor for the quaint view, but for the background music.

She played for that person. She composed music in her mind. Most of the melodies would come in fleeting moments of half-consciousness in the middle of the night, only to evaporate like dew once it occurred to her that she should write it down somewhere, anywhere. She was left with a dull, grey, shabby apartment in the morning, silent but for one or two chords still ringing in her mind.

Aisling remembers that city because it is there, on a bridge crowded with busy strangers rushing to and fro, that she meets Kiva. No matter how long she has known Kiva, the same moment lingers. In the back of her mind are the buttery sunrays dancing on Kiva's vibrant hair, the brief blinding flash of silver as the keys on her oboe caught the light. And Kiva, with her light, nimble fingers flitting across the keys like butterflies with a sort of effortless urgency, as if nothing existed but the soulful melody spilling into the air around them.

Sometimes when the cafe was closed they would wake up early anyway, just to walk amidst the dull concrete buildings and power lines, the closed street food stalls and slumbering motels. Their footsteps sounded in rhythm with the plaintive cry of the waterhen and the jubilant song of the sparrow. Underneath wisps of creamy white and light rose-coloured clouds, they would stand outside the convenience store, chewing on overly sweet, sticky glazed buns. The sounds around them built up gradually in a crescendo as the city woke up, enveloping Aisling in a quiet, rich harmony.

Music is a queer thing; it dissipates the moment it is played, and yet it lingers, suspended in mid-air. Kiva left the city for another bustling corner of the world, and yet the harmonious dissonance of the morning city sounds and the stirring tune of her oboe stayed with Aisling, rearranging themselves into a poignant melody.

As it is, the music has faded into a whisper. It's the little things that wear people down.

For Aisling, some things were completely within her expectations: working in a cafe whose meals she could not hope to afford, for example. Waking up at small hours for no reason at all, and not knowing what would ever become of the scattered chords trapped inside her mind.

It's the little things that wear people down. For Aisling, it was telling her friends day after day that no, she didn't need cash. It was receiving nothing but tepid smiles when she told her aunts about the little cafe. It was watching her older sister announce to the family that she was to become a mother, their delighted laughter echoing through the house, and thinking how there would never be the same laughter in her apartment because one tub of milk formula cost her about two weeks' income if she was lucky.

And finally, it was the day her parents came to visit, their arms loaded with jackets and baked goods and containers of soup. It was leaning over to kiss her mother's cheek and seeing the emerging streaks of grey on her mother's temples and realising that she herself was empty-handed.

And so Aisling goes with the flow. When she reads the news, she now no longer skips over the job advertisements. When she is offered a job at a local company, she takes it. She clears her desk at home, by now cluttered with half-finished score sheets, messy notes written at 2 A.M. on insomniac nights, unopened packets of instant coffee. She is able to afford food other than ready-to-eat meals. She moves out of her closet-sized apartment.

"It's odd," Kiva said one day during Aisling's first—and only—visit at her town since she left, breaking the silence they so often shared.

"What is?"

"How normal change feels. How normal growing older feels."

What Kiva said was true. To this day nothing major seems to have changed. She finds less occasion to laugh so hard it hurts, but she finds less occasion to cry into her pillow too. It's just that the cheap glazed buns she used to eat taste bittersweet, somehow. The warm light in the cafe she used to perform in looks different from outside the glass walls.

It's just that sometimes, she can't help but wonder what it is that persists in resounding through the vast hall of her mind; not quite there, but certainly not faded. Is it the last resonant note of that ballad she somehow managed to piece together at three in the morning but forgot the moment the sun rose? Or is it the warm, golden tone of Kiva's oboe, intertwined with the small talk of passersby? Or is it simply insomnia?

Most likely it's insomnia. The city is even brighter in the evening than it is during the day. The dazzling neon lights sparkle through the pitch-black night, making their way inside her tightly shut eyelids.