Incomplete music

“Sing with me! It’ll be fun!!”

“Isn’t the cliché supposed to be ‘dance with me’ ?!” She laughed.

“I’m not joking. C’mon!”

It was an on the spot singing competition being held at a mall, hundreds watching.

“I might be able to carry a pitch or two, but I most definitely can’t sing.”, “The audience will get nightmares for years and years to come” she added dramatically.

“Eva…”

“Which song?”

“Incomplete”

“It’s not even a duet, why do you need me for?! Go sing it, and I’ll be here cheering you on”

“Eva..”

He had a way of saying her name, that had always made her give in.

You couldn’t call them best friends. They didn’t hang out together a lot. But, when they were together, there was an easy comfort about them.

“Aaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!! Don’t ever make me do something like that again!!”

His laugh was soft as he said, “You were amazing.”

The simple way he said it, like a statement and not an exclamation made her smile.

Her smile made him slightly embarrassed, so he quickly changed the topic.

“What do you think of when you hear… or sing ‘Incomplete’, seeing as it is a sad song and you seem to know it by heart.”

She laughed out loud.

He had just wanted to distract her, but now he realized he really wanted to know. And her laughter made him more than just a little uncomfortable. His nervousness probably was very apparent as it just made her laugh louder.

“As weird as it sounds, Incomplete actually is a very happy memory for me. And I remember my sis every time I hear that song.

It was a few weeks after I had bought my first key board. Amy plays the guitar, right? So we were looking for a song that has good bits of both key board and guitar. Since I already had the sheet music of Incomplete, we decided on it.

Found tutorial videos online, and the lyrics. We spent the next two hours staring at the tutorial and singing along at the top of our voices. It was almost midnight when we realized that we had been so engrossed in the singing that the music was completely forgotten!

The guitar was still smugly on her lap, and being used as a drum, the music standing in for karaoke and the video of the piano, a blur at the back of her heads.

We realized it, and started laughing so hard, and when we stopped laughing, we saw the screen and sang along with the same gusto “baby…Oh baby, it’s written on your face” and then we laughed even more at that.”

She paused briefly at that to laugh again at her own story. He smiled as she continued.

“We were just so happy singing, not a care in the world about those poor sleeping souls. And I don’t think we ever got around to learning to play the song! Yet every time I hear it, it makes me smile.”

She finished that with a sweet smile of her own.

“Oh my God! I didn’t realize how late it is. I’ll get going OK!”

He just smiled again, and nodded as she ran.

No one quite heard him say quietly “When I hear that song, I think of you. Now I’ll still think of you,” This was why he had chosen the song after all. “Only I guess I will be smiling at it too”.

His smile was bittersweet.

But remembering her story again, he laughingly shook his head, got up and walked slowly to his car.


This is my entry for the HarperCollins–IndiBlogger Get Published contest, which is run with inputs fromYashodhara Lal and HarperCollins India.