OPERA

Love has taken her away to the other side of the world. Of her world.

A young girl brought up on emotions, romance, and passion.

Taken away, swept away by some tall blond stranger to the Promised Land trailing along in his wake. She’s forgotten herself. She’s forgotten herself to travel in his wake and years later she wakes up every living day away from the living daylights of her heyday. And if the weather is warm, hot even, hot as oven, people are cold. Forlorn. She’s forgotten by her own. Forgotten here. Forgotten there. Neither here nor there. Nobody cares.

Roaming in the no woman’s land of her home, her only hope, her only rope, her only hold, her only hold, her only stronghold is the radio. Her radio.

Going round and round, and round and round again, in circles doesn’t take her anywhere, doesn’t get her anywhere beyond disappearing little by little into thin air. Airborne on the airwaves, the melody threnodies on. The voice ducks and then is lifted up again by the music, pushing it  higher and higher, aloft. There it is again, like her, rising reaching for the sky now at the height of her passion. Provocative. Causing commotion in her emotions.

The music. That music…

She muses on the music. Music both does and doesn’t give way. Music doesn’t give in. Music doesn’t give up. Music reacts. Music penetrates. Music reactivates memories of the days way back when. Music infiltrates her, injects her with a renewed energy. Life by proxy for whatever it’s worth. She derives from the music her sole soulful amusement.

The voice. That voice…

The language.

Italian.

Italy. Vital Italian. Passionate. Wild. Wilderness of her wilder years sweeps back to her from beyond the years, from yonder the frontiers, the boundaries, the ocean, the waves, the airwaves on the radio. The radio operates on her some kind of magic. Its eerie arias arise and ooze, seep from the speaker and she melts in the melody. Italian soul music. Time-honoured and timeless before time wasted away the best years of her life. In the wake of the music she wakes up to another neverending dispassionate day in an uncompassionate abysmal day.

Arms akimbo, to no avail, wandering back to her travails of gambled away charismatic karma. She sleepwalks through life away from the bed in the direction of her realm, her chicken, her kitchen, her radio, her music. Italy.

Back to her kitchen. Back to her radio. Back to the music… Opera retaliates. Excavates… Digs deeper into the radiation of her frustration.

Opera shines on her life, glitters, rain down on the shatters of her shuttered existence out in the open. She makes do. She composes with whatever elements her wasting away routine is composed of. Automatic automated atomisation of her lifestyle that in her future has withdrawn her from her own very self. Self contained emotions. Musical libations of her retired expectations.

Her life. Dust specked, layered, sedimented, cobwebbed with more frustrations, deep rooting her in isolation and confinement. Staged on the expansive plains of Midwest America. A miracle would have to be worked to deter her from the strings and winds of her too humble abode where abandon abounds, binds her within the boundaries of her very imagination even. Uneven limbo of a could-have-been eventful life of a bimbo.

An old woman she will be before anybody notices… She will have withered, waned and worn to fade threadbare. Frayed. She doesn’t care. She makes allowances, makes amends, has nothing but compassion for those who are letting her sink into self-oblivion. Strippednight after night of her illusions. Ill fate of a dull-fated love.

But opera is at work. Radio on. Arias on air rub soul in the wound of her despair.

Piecing it together patchworks a collage that spells camouflage wide across the curtain fall of her former ambitions now generating, stirring confusion in her ad libiting illusions.

Ebben’ me ne andrò lontano…

And still I’ll go away… And she should go away… If she should leave… She had left but she would not leave again. She could not leave. The melody comes round and round again. But she’s stuck in a rut. In the groove of a tragically beautiful story of a love lost tuned sore as the melody lingers on in her mind. In the back of her mind dragging her back to the time when Opera was life. Was her life. Italy; Italian. Vital Italian. The language takes her back to where she belongs. Whence she has never really left. Whence she had left her heart in only in part. Italian takes her back. Italian takes her back home. Italian drives her back home. Italian flies her back home. She sings as she listens and she glistens as she sings. And she mourns as she sings. Of bygone days. Of bygone hopes. Of life aching to be lived. Of a heart aching to be loved, madly loved but only badly loved for her life is deprived of life as love should be lived. Wild. As love should be beautifully passionate as Italian Opera.

Jesse CRAIGNOU