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<If anyone ever invents an easier way to carry a guitar around with them,> Sanji thought to herself as she walked down Canongate, <I’ll be the first to buy it.>
This lighter cloth traveling case, after all, was supposed to be the easier alternative to her black hard-shell one… but with the way its straps kept loosening against her shoulders—no matter how many times Sanji tried to tighten them—instead the case only threatened to fall off her back every second it wasn’t jolting the neck uncomfortably against her head.
Plus, as Sanji noticed the gathering of gray clouds only a kilometer or so away, she wasn’t too sure just how reliably waterproof this case would be either.
Good thing she had decided to also bring her hard case with her into this city.
In truth, it hadn’t been an easy decision at all, knowing just what to pack. Flying to meet up with family in Paris for a few days; even to show up for a business summit in Luxembourg for a week or so, was one thing. There, Sanji only ever needed to scope out the nature of the hotel suites her parents booked for her and her sister first, as their proximity determined just what would be best for Sanji to bring of her gear…
And store…
And hide away, if and when she needed to keep things out of sight.
(As well as what mutes to bring; what kind of noise cancelling headphones… which laptop and which memory cards. Sometimes, even which playlists on her mp3 player… though lately, it seemed she was successfully keeping her volume down low enough to not raise any eyebrows when she wanted to jam out to Mclusky or The Bleachers.)
But now, being solo for a year… to live here in Edinburgh all on her own…
Yes, it gave her freedom: glorious, glorious freedom to finally sing and play her heart out as loudly as she wanted when she wasn’t attending class. But equally for the first time, it gave her more choices of her own to make… difficult choices. And Sanji never did feel she was great at having to choose.
<Though, I chose to come here for myself, didn’t I?> Sanji thought somewhat indignantly… and, somewhat to maybe… maybe convince herself that it was so.
Well, she had. Even if she was studying graphic design officially, there were far better places she could be doing that— and right now, Sanji was following her GPS, looking for some of the live music venues she had researched before she’d gotten here— before the semester even started!
As… Sanji sighed. Maybe she shouldn’t have left her condenser mic back at home… and maybe she should have brought her best acoustic Yamazaki with her after all, instead of a cheaper knock-off she’d found in a thrift shop in London before landing here… and should she have equally brought some sheet music with her AFTER all????? No… no; that much, Sanji reminded herself, she could always just print from the university’s library or something on her off-periods, if she really needed to. And after all, some things weren’t worth taking such a risk for, in case anything might have gotten damaged or stolen along the way.
Granted, yes, she had traveler’s insurance that would cover her for some time; her parents had made sure of that… but… well, the less they knew about precisely what she needed to be insured, the better… and the less Sanji relied on her family, even a little, for what her own objectives were that… didn’t quite align with theirs… the better she could at least feel about herself deep down.
Sanji sighed again, but then, she caught herself… swallowed, scrolled down to the next site on her list, and kept walking, looking up only briefly to make sure of where she was going.
The last two venues Sanji had checked into that morning were kind of a bust: they were mostly empty; slow-paced, quiet and dim… and if anything, Sanji got the impression that they would want more traditional Scottish folk-music for their pubs… not anything like her own style.
She stopped for a moment, stuffing her phone in her pocket to tighten her straps yet again.
~~BUZZZZ Ring ring ring! Ring ring ring! BUZZZZ~~~
Sanji jolted, the familiar feelings of dread, resentment, and guilt all rushing in at once— was it her parents???? What would she have to tell them she was doing at this moment? Walking to scope out more of the campus before classes start tomorrow? Going to a student meet-and-greet? Getting coffee???
She hurriedly checked the screen… then sighed again… this time in relief. It was an unknown number: almost DEFINITELY a scammer, since Sanji had only just registered this SIM card about a week ago now.
Beep!
Sanji blocked the number from her phone, and kept walking. Though… at this stage… she knew she’d be lying entirely to herself, if she said that she still felt like going forward with her plan.
Of course those last two venues had been a bust. No matter what, you didn’t find places of True, Certified, Scream-out-loud ROCK in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, strolling out and about amongst families and students and tourists in shopping areas of Edinburgh. (If it were London instead… heck, maybe even Glasgow… Sanji ruminated… maybe it would be a different case.)
No… Sanji knew. If she really, REALLY wanted to find the spaces where rock could happen in this city… she was going to have to go out at night: go to some really hard clubs— probably joints in between dark stone corners; places her parents would never dream of; never perceive as even thinkable for their youngest daughter to be going to… places Sanji herself could barely conceive of, having never been…
Probably she’d have to go through harsh crowds too… who probably drink a ton… smoke a ton… possibly even do drugs!?!?
Sanji laughed nervously a little to herself. No, it’d just be downright foolish of her to try that… and on the night before the semester starts… haha, no. It was quite laughable. She’d never do that. And after all… there was still plenty of time for her to find other places on the long list she’d saved in her phone.
As Sanji looked back down at her phone again, passing an oddly titled place— (‘Suasage Mania?’ Wasn’t it supposed to be ‘Sausage?’ … maybe that was a Scottish-local thing?) she knew she didn’t have too much time to keep searching, such as it was. Although her new flatmates probably wouldn’t be SUPER bothered if she was a little late to their pre-term student party, Sanji knew she’d still need to give herself time to….
…once again…
…safely store her guitar away before meeting up with them.
She had had some hopes that perhaps the people she would be living with for the next year would be music-enthusiasts like her… but, none of them seemed to be very interested when she told them, even simply, that she could play guitar… never even mind, then, loving rock. But, perhaps that was to be expected— none of them were artists: instead, they were each business and finance majors from Hong Kong. If anything, Sanji bet they were simply including her because she could at least speak Mandarin with them, if not as well Cantonese…
…sigh…
… all as it was a kind of unspoken expectation for her to follow along so they’d ‘have each other’ in this otherwise mostly-white city… without ever necessarily being open to her own true reasons for being there.
<Sometimes, even when you can speak the same language, it just doesn’t matter… > Sanji thought.
She looked around again. As her own thoughts had been flitting about for so long, Sanji had somehow ended up on Nicholson street without noticing quite how… and as far as her GPS radar had picked up, there weren’t going to be any kinds of musical venues farther down this way. Not unless she wanted to go to the Queen’s Hall… but… would that be a place for rock at all? Or, was it more the kind of staid classical venue of Sanji’s younger years, playing piano?
As she thought that maybe… MAYBE she might take a closer peek just to be sure, Sanji saw the rain clouds move closer in from that direction… and turned back around. She really didn’t feel like dealing with any rain if she didn’t have to just then… as, if Sanji was completely honest, her mood was already very low.
She hadn’t gotten any proper sleep at all that prior night.
For some reason, Sanji had felt supremely anxious; more, even, than she had felt just before coming to this city to move in. Her mind was troubled… she had tossed and turned… and, when she finally did get to sleep some time past midnight, her chopped, gnarled dreams were of unpleasant things…
Strange… blurry… giant … monsters, almost… solid, yet, almost pure white? With scary faces…
That she was running away from, as they tried to attack her…
And… for some odd reason, forests… burnt logs… maybe… someone was with her?
Sanji couldn’t remember… she thought she maybe dreamed of like… a girl with blue hair or something…
And a taller man with darker hair who scared her, though she wasn’t exactly sure why… she couldn’t quite remember his face… was it… that he might have turned into a monster himself? If she remembered correctly…
And persisting all throughout… always, she felt this huge fear… that someone would see her.
At that point, Sanji had to pause… waiting for the crosswalk to change. She was very uncomfortable, and very irritated now… and … all the more so, nervous about walking around on her own any longer.
…Maybe at this stage… it would be best to just get a small coffee from the nearest Co-Star and call it quits. Sanji typed “Co-Star near me” into her GPS—there was one just a little further down, apparently—and she set off towards it, still annoyed. At least maybe the caffeine and sugar would brighten her mood a bit…
10 minutes later, Sanji was standing inside the cramped, already-student-filled Co-Star café. She glanced at their coffee selection menu from the back of the queue as the people in front shouted their orders amidst all of the noise.
Sighing in further annoyance as she waited in line, Sanji first looked to her phone. When she saw a new message from her sister, she quickly stuffed her phone back into her pocket… even more annoyed and not wanting to deal with that just then, either. Then, Sanji tried to look around for any kind of suitable mental distraction… anything, as she could feel her irritation and nerves growing. She stared out of the window at the Poundmark store across the street…
Watching the gradually darkening buildings… then the rain beginning to fall…
Watching coats and trails billow in the wind… very windy, as this city was known for being…
Watching people pass by… taller people, slower people… a bearded man with a dog…
A group of students wearing backpacks and buying gear for their student rooms and flats, no doubt…
Among those students, two black girls pulling suitcases and holding shopping bags of their own… one, by the looks of it, with… ‘dreadlocks’, were they called?
The other with, Sanji had to admit, a very unique hairstyle… and a really cool-looking black jacket…
Reminding Sanji of her cool jacket—
The girl with her own uniqueness… her light-colored eye… her vivid-electric hair… Her AWESOME eyepatch, her tossed-about belt and brown-leather rucksack and skin-tight jeans… her amazing striped shirt that she just rocked… and how … strong and fearless and mysterious she seemed!!!!
All as she had disappeared just as quickly as Sanji had seen her that day during the Cherry Blossom Festival.
“You… fly?”
As ever, Sanji WISHED she could remember more of what the girl had actually said to her, what she must have said…. Whatever it was, it can’t actually have been about flying, after all…
As Sanji tried to recall… she stepped out of the queue for the coffee. Once again, she wasn’t absolutely sure of what she wanted anyway…maybe a caramel latte? Or, maybe not… and the queue was rather long…
…but strangely, although Sanji regretted that she still couldn’t recall the girl’s words to her, in her train of thought, she realized she did recall something else— something a little happier that had equally fallen into her dreams too… somewhere in between the nightmares and just before waking up: an odd, female voice, almost as if it came from a recording???
“Letting in light and love… in a new city…”
It had echoed in her mind… she could barely remember anything of the setting of the dream beyond that. Yet those words… somehow, they struck a chord in her— letting in light and love… in a new city.
Sanji then walked out of the crowded popular cafe, thinking that perhaps she wouldn’t have time to continue waiting anyway…
And, though slight drops of rain fell upon her phone’s screen as she stepped outside the door and onto the pavement, they barely lasted a minute. Sanji looked up:
The clouds were swiftly moving, drifting in the dispersing wind. As they did… a once-again bright blue sky had returned, letting in a magnificent burst of sunlight as some seagulls cawed from above.
It started… Sanji could hear a rhythm play in her mind. She juggled it there, along with her other many thoughts…
Sanji was in a new city… unlike Paris; unlike Tokyo, Taipei, Los Angeles and San Francisco, Seattle and Luxembourg and London… she, Sanji, herself, was in Edinburgh…
A place that wasn’t about business and wasn’t about her family… a place that was new all in its own way… new to Sanji… new to what SHE could do here… by the very facet of her being alone in it.
Letting in light and love… in a new city.
The rhythm grew. Sanji practically sped along now, typing in ‘coffee near me’ as fast as she could on her GPS… quickly grabbed her plain latte from the less busy, lesser-known Stone-Lantern café… drained her cup of its contents just as quickly as she sped back to her flat… unzipped her guitar case back in her room…
…And strummed…
Strummed that crazy rhythm.
She turned on her laptop; started the familiar songwriting program, plugged in her earbuds.
And she recorded…
And recorded…
Wrote… scratched out… pieced together…
And wrote more.
Entered in some digital tracks through her midi-keyboard, timing it to that pattern… <Maybe a drum beat??? Oooo, a little vocal reverb… plus some harmonization…>
Shifted, moved around… <No… that shouldn’t go there… OH MAN… that part… that part is powerful… should this be in it? Oooo this has TOTAL grunge-meets-Hendrix energy!!!>
And she sang. Not as loudly as she might have liked if not for her flatmates… and no, not with her condenser mic… but still… clear. Still IN it… still there…
Sanji could feel a little bit lighter within already.
She then looked at her clock— it was about 5 minutes to everyone’s party starting… she probably needed to get ready…
“<San-Shi!!! Are you back yet? It’s almost time!!!??>” Li-Shan called out from behind Sanji’s closed bedroom door.
“<Yes, I’ll be there in a minute!>” Sanji replied in Mandarin…
But, Sanji reminded herself that, after all, it wouldn’t be an issue if she were a little late to this.
She pressed the return key, and listened to the playback.
Not bad.
Of course… Maybe it’d need a few more layers… it definitely wasn’t finished. But, with parts Sanji could tell she loved … it was definitely off to the right start.
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