"Joyful, joyful, Lord, we adore thee..."
Eve's fingers, each with a mind of their own, leave featherlight kisses along the piano's ivorite keys. She can never quite trace the pathway between the notes she plays and the melodies that seep from the instrument's belly, but it pleases something deep inside of her. There's a wordless communion between the keys as she strikes them and the seamless chords that they forge, one that she feels her very soul bear witness to and yet she can never translate it. Her only ever pennyworth is her siren song, because Eve was born with the voice of an angel.
Before her mother died, she used to so delicately recount the days of her second pregnancy, of her unwavering assuredness that she'd actually felt Eve's diaphragm take the shape of a harp in her womb, which is how she'd "always known" her daughter would have said voice of an angel. Before her father died, he nurtured that talent of hers with his every waking moment, largely with her unchallenged spot as the leader of the church choir he'd stewardedâpre-mortem. Before her brother died, he'd always duetted her singing with his own magical handwork, either between the strings of a guitar or upon the keys of a piano.
Sometimes he'd even duetted her voice with his ownâon birthdays and Christmases and family reunions, and then once and for all in his final moments.
Understandably, Eve's relationship with the gift she'd been blessed isn't at all what it used to be. It's only when she lays it bare in the name of the Lord, with any genre of gospel to mind, that the peace she'd once sought out within it is restored.
"God of glory, Lord of love... Hearts unfold like flowers before thee..." Eve, for a fraction of a second, lets her eyes flicker open. Upon her line of sightâher small knot of captivated listeners, the staggering view of Southmere Lake from the top floor of The Link, and across its width, Eve's dot of an apartment. "Hail thee as the sun above... G'arn, Naya."
The Naya in question places a hand on her protruding stomach, too rounded in its shape to be mistaken for anything other than a baby bump. The anticipated radiance of her voice is patently no match for that radiance that shimmers along the surface of her porcelain skin, the glow of the setting sun or the glow of her swelling youth or perhaps the glow of her very ownâafter all, Naya is barely 17.
Sure of her talent and rightfully so, Naya takes it away, "Melt the clouds of... Sin and sadnessâ"
"Kems."
From the seat beside Naya's, a poised Kemi leans up a little straighter. Her arms are bare of fabric but her skin is clothed with ink, to eulogise the traumas of her past or rather her triumph over the fact. In short, a troubled victim of a sex-trafficking operation, but the naked truth for Eve is still a journey away from revelation.
"Drive the dark of doubt... Away." Kemi's voice blends with Naya's like two tributaries into one ever-flowing stream. Both Kemi and Naya share mirrored smiles, carefully in awe of each other.
"Giver of immortal gladness..." A series of breathless gasps and astonished intervals of applause choke up the entire room, mind-shattering awe at Eve's riffs and high notes, and how unexacting of all things she manages to make it seem. And as she gives the room a brisk once over, she revels in the gladness she feels from being inside of it. Eve is every bit the optimist, the happy-go-lucky type, both the supply and the demand of happiness, because she's well aware of her own everlasting wellhead of joy.
Bringing smiles to the faces of the troubled, embracing the rejected, thawing the benumbed, Eve knows through and through that this is her calling. Because above all else, Eve believes in love, seconded by her belief that the Lord blesses to bless. And with all that He's blessed her withâin the face of sufferings that could rupture a healthy heartâshe'd be a fool not to use every fibre of her being not to bless everyone within her reach, even those beyond it. Love grows wherever Eve goes, as does hope and happiness and all things sweet and light.
"Fill us... With the light, fill us with lightâ"
The room quells to a paralysing silence.
"Oh, fill us... With the light of day..."
Eve welcomes a standing ovation among her audience of eight, one young boy's two fingered whistle swiftly shushed by the ear-struck girl sat beside him. Morgan, in a seat by the wall of a window, watches on in delight. Eve addresses the youth and offers a warm farewell, verbal invitations for newcomers and see you laters for those who always come again. When the room is finally cleared, Eve turns back to Morgan.
"Sooo... What'd you think?"
"You can sing. I know you said you could sing but," Morgan presses a flustered hand against her chest, "you can really sing."
"Thanks, babe, but I'm talking about everything in general. It was good?" Eve fishes. Morgan, bored and curious, had spent majority of the day shadowing Eve as she operated her youth program. At most, she'd expected a gathering of teenagers in the crack of some hall but this, all that Eve has created and the more she ventures to establish, it all blew Morgan's mind. She gets a secondhand high of pride just being in the vicinity. It makes her want to do better.
"This is crazy, Eve. Your heart is one of a kind. I can't believe you run all this full time and you're so happy to do so," Morgan awes, "You can tell how happy it all makes you."
Eve's smile pans across her face, "It does make me happy. I love it, especially here. I've never had my own building before."
"I wanna help. I wanna get involved. I don't do nothing for this community," Morgan digresses, although even now, the two girls are unaware there isn't much community in their community to work with. They don't know, of course, that it's about to start with them. Morgan only sees the joy that Eve is brought to by giving to others, and she decides she'd like some of that joy for herself. However, as much as her cause warms her being, Eve knows well and true that her joy is founded elsewhere, Eve knows she's more than willing to walk Morgan's softened heart there, too.
Because Eve's joy, the beat to her unfolded heart, her immortal gladnessâyes, Eve's joy comes from the Lord.
Ok, I basically finished yesterday I just fell asleep, so this is gonna count as a Tuesday update.
Thoughts and opinions!
See ya lataaa (tonight)!