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You were never very good at getting the rhythm down from just reading the music. It took listening to it and trying in vain to make the foot tapping thing work, and a metronome sometimes, and a lot of gripping your violin too tightly so you don’t do something too rash.
Remembering it now makes you shake with that old desire to just make something hurt, that desire to make yourself hurt.
You shut your eyes tight, clench your jaw, try to listen to what Mari told you. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.
After the multi-bar rest comes the first hurdle — it just sounds… wrong.
Hold the first note, one-two-three-one-two, now E — missed it, held it too long. It’s the first note —
You didn’t use to get this angry. Back then it wasn’t a requiem.
You try brute force it, get up to the whole note you and Mari play together, but you hold it longer, you remember. And for a moment, it’s only the violin’s piercing tone, ringing out without anything else.
You can’t play the end. Not without her. It feels right that it should end with you alone.
Some parts feel right, the parts that just flow right out of you, the parts where you can hear Mari’s playing in some distant corner of your mind but…
She’s not here.
It’s a duet and you’re alone.
You play it again, bar sixty-eight to the end of bar seventy-two, just to hear the ending, instead of the expected ascending tone into D, it’s a descending major third. There’s something in the music theory you managed to pick up from Mari to explain why it feels incomplete, unfinished.
And you know that if you play the end, it’ll make sense. That’s where the violin plays the melody, that’s where it can function alone but it doesn’t. You practiced that part over and over again for a reason, you never managed to get exactly in time with her, when that’s the whole point of the ending, you’re supposed to be synchronous, everything’s supposed to be okay.
As you’re about to stop, to pack your violin away before you break it again, you hear a little voice. You think to yourself in Mari’s voice, or maybe she whispers it to you.
“Do it for me, little brother.”
There’s a lump in your throat that you try to swallow away.
You pick up your violin.
It’s not perfect. You’re rusty. You stop and start and don’t get the rhythm right. It feels empty without the piano.
But.
It feels like music. It finally makes sense.