The Girl with the Flaxen Hair

Claude Debussy — Préludes, Book I

The first note and the color is already there.

Amber. Not bright. Not burning. The amber of late afternoon light caught in a glass of honey, warm and still and entirely sure of itself. It arrives before I have time to prepare for it, before I have even fully settled into the listening.

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Within the amber, circles.

Not the same size. Never the same size. One large, generous, unhurried. One medium, a little more delicate. Others smaller still, like the last notes of a thought trailing off before sleep. They do not orbit the way my brother’s cobalt circles orbit. They dance. Lightly, the way something dances when it doesn’t know it’s being watched. When the piano touches a higher note the smaller circles lift. When the melody deepens the larger one steadies them, holds the center without asking for credit.

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This piece makes me think of Audrey Hepburn.

Not any particular image of her. Just the quality of her. The way she carried elegance without effort, the way beauty in her hands always seemed to be in service of something gentler than beauty. The amber is like that. It does not insist. It simply is, warm and luminous and slightly out of reach, the way certain things are most fully themselves when they are not trying to be anything at all.

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When the music stops, the circles do not stop immediately.

They slow. The dancing becomes drifting. The amber thins at its edges, the warmth softening into something closer to the memory of warmth. The largest circle is the last to go, holding its place a moment longer than the others, the way a candle holds its glow for a breath after the flame has been lifted from it.

And then they are gone.

The room returns. But for a moment it is still amber.

Adrian Adair