#213

Kyrie Eleison starts, and I know that by the end of the evening, I will have cried, and my face will be red and look like I’ve been crying. It calls something in me, it brings something to the surface. I feel I have been drowning and came to Paris for days to surrender to whatever I have left in me and found tickets for Mozart’s Requiem at the La Madeleine church, which isn’t the oldest or the most beautiful, but it is the one that lends itself to a concert like this, much like St Martin’s in London.

I arrive, it’s summer, and the weather is fine and not at all overly hot, and the monumental doors at the front of the building are open, and we take our seats, and there are candles, and the doors stay open, and the wind blows in, and the air of the French summer summons us to pay attention. I’m awake, I’ve not eaten, but I have drank, and there in the middle of the city, the darkness comes, the music swells, the choir sings their lungs out, and I sit and absorb the sound. I think of a girl here, that I know, or knew, once and wonder if she still lives in the city, but the Dies Irae calls me back to the music, to the room, to the church, to the sound of death as prescribed by Mozart and I wonder why no one gets a requiem any longer - why they have gone out of fashion, because I can see no better way to celebrate a life than with a series of songs, prescribed by the gods of music.