Unsung

It's not that he's on his own. He's been on his own before, has lived alone for most of his adult life. It's that moving to this new place has meant entering a new circle of loneliness, a purer, more profound solitude. There are days now when he doesn't speak to another human being, not even to say hello or thank you, so that the sound of his own voice, as he reads a poem aloud, say, or a passage from a book, startles him, seems an imposition. He has taken to mouthing the words instead, appropriating the shapes of the phrases even as he maintains his own privacy.

Words are not all he appropriates. When he listens to music now he pretends to play along - guitar, piano, saxophone, cello - he has many imaginary talents, though the applause at the end is always the same. He has trouble reconciling his popularity in these daydreams with the reality of his social life. Could he really handle being in the spotlight all the time? He imagines himself as a enigmatic, hermit-like figure, refusing to grant interviews, offering no comment to the endless speculation about him in the press.

Or perhaps, (since the cost to his privacy seems hardly worth it), he could be one of those greats who are only discovered after their deaths? No, that would mean they would dig up all these details about him afterwards, come up with all sorts of salacious gossip, misinterpret who he was entirely.

So maybe it'd be better if he remained undiscovered, his talents obscured by some combination of natural reticence and missed opportunity. Maybe that was the kind of artist he was meant to be, an unsung genius, one of the thousands playing their music in suburban garages and empty nightclubs, just waiting for someone to notice them.

Yes, that seemed about right.