Film Music

The sad music that ends the film continues to play after I leave the theater. A saxophone player in an alley around a corner stands before a hat and plays but has no face. I turn the corner and he isn’t there, but the music echoes off the bricks from over the roofs. As in the film, I don’t see the musicians, but music fills all the spaces. It reminds me I am alone. It reminds me of death. Someone on the sidewalk talks and for a syllable this is the voice of my dead sister the voice of my dead wife a note in the melody, comes as a shock, followed by unbidden tears, and I’m unable to move. Over the lights and the people, as if in stop-motion, a full moon has risen, golden, the same as the inlay of my wedding ring, gone now from my wedding finger. This image would end a film, and the music would stop; yet, haunting and strange, it is not like real life, not the way we supposed.