Sweet Romance17 min read
The Suona, the Silk Flower, and the Dan Who Stole My Sight
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I learned to make noise before I learned to whisper.
"When I first crawled," my mother liked to say, "you blew a wrong note and the whole village applauded." She didn't mean it as praise—our kind of music was for funerals and weddings, for jolting people out of the ordinary. We were the family who sang at send-offs and at feasts, the family with the big brass suona case always leaning against the wall like a stubborn promise.
"I'm Melody," I used to answer when people asked my name, because the given name in our house always got swallowed by the drums and the jokes. "Melody Campbell," I would say properly, though the name sounded like something from a city song I hadn't learned yet.
"You play the suona like a storm," my father told me once, pride and apology braided in his voice. "And you laugh like thunder."
I practiced until my fingers bled calluses. I marched out with high steps on neighborhood stages, I learned the comic beats and the trick lines, how to hold an audience in a holler and then leave them gasping at a joke. We were called the "white-funeral troupe" by kids who'd been told not to play with us. They said we smelled of old rituals and unexpected things. I wore the nickname like a cloak and kept on playing.
The day I got the envelope from the conservatory—the one that said "accepted"—my family's backyard erupted. Drums, suona, my aunt pretending to faint in mock grief that would make an actual ghost laugh. I felt proud and ridiculous at once. I was the only one in my line who had ever passed those gates, and yet, compared to the academy lineage, I felt very small.
The conservatory was all arches and thin stacks of posters for classical shows. People there moved like they were stage-lighted even in the hallway. I clutched my suona case—my big brass friend that the other students rolled their eyes at—and walked into a new world.
"Melody!" Felix called, white teeth flashing as he waved me over.
Felix Santoro had been a friendly face from the beginning. He was one of the suona seniors, a big grinning man who could charm an audience into clapping before the concert started. "You made it," he said. "You can do the three—no, the four notes without scaring the audience?"
"I can do twelve," I lied, but he laughed and that eased the tightness in my chest.
The first time I saw River Schneider, he was not River Schneider—he was a vision draped in white sleeves and a starching of powdered beauty. The sky was unusually black for the hour, and the streetlight above the corner made everything seem like a painting.
I remember thinking, You are a proper piece of art.
I was running, mind full of worry about rehearsals. I had agreed, because Felix had begged me with the softness of cheap tea and earnestness, to fill in for a broken hand on stage. "Just three beats," he had said. "Piece of cake. It's only a supplement."
I was balancing my suona case and my nerves when I collided into the tide of silk. I fell with a graceless thump and a full-body embarrassment.
"Oh my gosh—" a voice said sharply. "Are you blind?"
"I—" I grunted, pulling myself up, cheeks burning. Before me stood the most extraordinary set of eyes I'd ever seen. River—because I later learned his name—was full stage costume: brows lacquered dark in precise curves, lips like a cherry arranged by a careful hand. He wore his costume like someone wearing a memory. He didn't move when I hit him; he just watched. The busyness of lamp and shadow painted his profile like a living portrait.
"I'm sorry," I said, patting dust off my trousers. My suona case had skittered and thrown open. A blue velvet flower rolled out and landed in my palm with the weight of something precious.
"That's mine," he said without turning. His voice was lower than his appearance; a contradiction that made me dizzy.
I held the velvet bloom out. "You dropped it—here."
He took the flower with a hand that looked, somehow, both big and delicate. "Thank you," he said. He didn't smile. He didn't frown. He simply moved on, and I watched until his back disappeared into the night.
"Who is that?" Felix asked later, when I finally stopped pretending that my throat wasn't an overworked drum.
"An apparition," I said. "A literary thief."
"You mean River?" Felix laughed. "He's the conservatory's golden boy. Don't stare. You will be noticed."
I did stare. When I tell you that my heart misbehaved that night, I mean it in the simple way hearts misbehave: it beat too fast, as if it were a cymbal that someone struck with the wrong mallet.
The show that night was full of lights and careful breathing. I had to play second suona accompaniment—one of those tiny but essential places on the stage where if you miss one note the whole scene loses its balance. Felix had assured me, "I've got your back. You follow my lead."
"Just watch me when I nod," he said. "If I blink twice, you blow low."
"You mean like semaphore?" I muttered.
He grinned. "Exactly like semaphore."
River sang as if he were the story itself. On stage he was not a boy or a man; he was a woman-shaped melody, the kind the stories hang on. His hands drew the air with an elegance that made the world feel thin. I couldn't help but look; a performer like that pulls the gaze like a magnet.
Halfway through, a note from my suona wavered. I pushed my breath and trusted my fingers and the music, but the pitch slipped a hair higher than intended. Nobody backstage made a sound. On stage, River's eyes flicked briefly toward the orchestra pit and then back to his face. For a sliver of time, his gaze sat with me in the clatter of instruments.
After the show, Felix came up and punched my shoulder in a pleased way. "Not bad," he said. "Not bad at all."
"Someone blocked my entry into the conservatory ensemble."
"What?" Felix's laugh had gone thin at the edges.
"It was River," I said. I hated the sourness in my voice. "He said my pitch had been off and therefore I shouldn't be allowed in by invitation."
Felix stared. "River did that?"
"He did," I said. "He even apologized for his earlier comment—said he was rude. Then he refused to let me in on merit of my friend status. He said: 'If you want in, apply like everyone else.'"
Felix whistled low. "He's strict."
"Cold," I said.
"He doesn't do favorites," Felix said. "He does standards."
"Was he cruel?" I asked.
"No," Felix said. "He was fair, in a way we don't expect anymore."
"I don't want to be fair," I said, and I almost meant it.
After that I researched River the way one stalks a stage legend: articles, photos, comments on student boards. He was a son of lineage—his parents were the kind of people whose notes were recorded in the margins of conservatory journals. He had awards like stars pinned on his lapel. He was, people said, a prodigy. People liked to call him the "city's blossom," an odd title for someone who wore powder and paint.
"You're being dramatic," Finley said, glancing at me over takeout. Finley Box was my roommate and the best person to have if you were learning how to be alive in a dorm. She had a laugh that slapped the air in the best way.
"I'm in love," I said.
She didn't bother to look surprised. "About time. Who is it?"
"River Schneider," I said. "The Dan."
She whistled. "High stakes."
"Don't make fun," I pleaded.
"I'm not," she said. "I think it's sweet that someone can make you that ridiculous."
"I feel ridiculous enough on the inside," I said. "And I would still like to join the ensemble."
"If you want to prove him wrong," Finley said, "don't become another rumor. Become the kind of musician that makes people forget where they heard 'not allowed' in the first place."
"You talk like you wrote a manifesto."
"I talk like someone who will hold your suona while you walk onto a big stage," she said. "So what are you going to do?"
"Practice." I said it like a vow.
Days turned into a drum roll of rehearsals. I went to the pit like a soldier and practiced correct pitch until my chops hurt. I took private lessons between classes and learned to tune my breath like a line of prayer. I filled pages of notation with the same stubbornness that had once made me walk on stilts as a child. I was not going to be a backstage anecdote. I wanted to be a sound that belonged on stage with dignity.
And River kept being River—cold, distant, exacting. He did not invite me into conversation, but his eyes occasionally caught mine. Not in a way that read "I notice you because I like you." More in a way that read "I notice you because you are part of the performance world now."
One afternoon Felix took me aside. "Auditions for the ensemble are in two weeks," he said. "You better be ready."
"How do I beat River's disapproval?" I asked.
"You don't," Felix said with a grin. "You earn his respect."
The day of auditions, the hall smelled of rosin and old programs. Students came with folds of music and trembling faces. I sat in the corner gripping my suona, feeling like an anachronism. My turn came and I put the bloom of the blue velvet flower in my pocket as a ridiculous talisman. I had once been ashamed of odd pockets of my life; I had learned to turn them into a melody.
When I finished, the adjudicators whispered among themselves. "A suona," one said. "Her pitch is unusual."
"Strength," another said. "Character."
Then River walked in. He watched each performer with the slow burn of someone who could see the bones of a performance before the skin. When he looked at me, the hall tightened.
"You played well," he said later, as the results were posted and students clustered in small storms. He looked near-statuesque, his face clean, the light soft at the edges. "You have passion, and a voice that can draw a crowd. But technique—"
"I worked on technique," I said. "I wanted to show you—"
"You showed me your courage," he said. "Courage and the wrong pitch can be dangerous on a stage. You must learn to hold your note, Melody."
His use of my full name felt like an acknowledgement.
"I will," I said. "I'll learn."
A slow, unexpected smile crossed River's face. "Persistence is redeeming," he said. "There is room for people who work."
For months after, our interactions were like stage directions: he corrected me coldly, I bristled, he softened slightly, then left. I felt as if we were playing a duet that had not yet found its song. Still, that was where the first heartbeats came: the small, singular moments when he stepped from perfect distance and bent to make space for me.
"You're not like the others," River said once, as he helped move a heavy backdrop.
"Others?" I asked.
"Musicians sometimes move like ornaments," he said. "You move like a builder. You make music to be used."
I laughed. "I build with a tool that people laugh at."
"Then it's a tool that can make laughter into something wise," he said.
That moment—his hands steadying the cloth, his voice low and patient—was the first heart-pull. He had been so full of ice that when he thinned it, the warmth surprised me like sunlight finding a cold face.
Another heart-moment came in the small absurdities. I remember one evening, we both stayed late to practice. The hallway lights had a soft hum. I was cold and nervous and deciding whether to play a particularly bold phrase.
"You're trying to shove all your feelings into a single note," River said without looking up.
I scowled. "Music isn't confession."
"It can be," he said. "If you let it."
He had always been so composed that when he said those simple things, they felt like an offering. He picked up his costume sash to fold it and his fingers brushed mine.
"Sorry," he muttered, but his smile was the kind of small, private thing that chased the cold away.
That brush of hands—so fleeting and electric—was the second beat.
The third came when a rumor spread through campus: a big performance invitation, a prestigious festival in the city. The conservatory announced a joint piece requiring delicate accompaniment. I applied like everyone else. For once, my old life—the life where my relatives called me to perform in village whims—met the new one openly.
"When I first heard you play," River said backstage, once, "I thought you would be loud and crude. You are neither. You are loud because you must get through the crowd; you are crude because you know your own thunder. But you also listen."
"You mean I'm not hopeless?" I said.
He looked at me with something like wonder. "You are not hopeless."
He stood close enough that I could see the little sweep of his lashes. He exhaled, a tiny sound. "If you ever want to ask how to hold a note, ask me."
I nearly laughed out of relief. It was a casual push; not a declaration. But when a person like River Schneider offers to teach you how to be better, it feels like someone has handed you the backstage key to a castle.
We practiced together. He corrected my embouchure, showed me how to keep the air like a steady river and not a burst waterfall. He graded my tune by the ghost it left in the air. Each correction was an intimate thing—an arm guiding, a word breathed near my ear—and with each of them my feelings deepened.
One evening, after a late run-through, we came out to the small courtyard. A cold wind chased lacquered leaves across the steps. Students clustered in pairs and groups like stray choreographies. River and I sat on opposite ends of a bench. He was quiet longer than usual.
"Do you ever feel pressure like it's a hand on your throat?" I asked.
"Every performance," he said. "I sleep with the sound of applause like a patient who cannot forget a song."
I shifted. "Do you ever regret becoming the thing everyone expects you to be?"
He was already River: composed, precise. "I regret the things that are still undone," he said. "I don't regret the work. It keeps me honest."
He turned to me and for the first time, let a little flippant smile loosen his face. "Besides, if I were not what people expected, I wouldn't be interesting."
I felt like I might tip if he smiled more.
"Then be interesting with me," I said before I could stop myself.
He tilted his head. "What do you mean?"
"Help me be better," I said. "Not to impress anyone. Help me for music."
He considered my hand, then, in a small ceremony of courage, he took it. "You will have to work harder than you imagine," he warned.
"I already am," I said.
He squeezed my fingers and something quiet and steady passed between us. It was not yet love as a thunderclap; it was the slow undoing of resistance. It was a hand drawn across a dusted portrait, discovering color.
We built an odd partnership. He taught, I practiced. He offered little corrections that felt like gifts. I played with new intention. We shared late-night noodles, accidental jokes, and the awkwardness of two performers trying to be ordinary. People noticed.
"He's different with you," a girl in our class said one afternoon, watching River hand me a folded music sheet like a sacred thing.
"He is," Felix said, smug. "You made him soften."
"Don't," I told Felix. "If I hear you say that again I'll challenge you to a duel."
He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder. "Don't worry. You have my blessing."
And yet campus gossip, as it does, spiraled. There was admiration, speculation, and those small jealousies that orbit any bright thing. River remained reserved, but in the rare public space—during rehearsals, at committee meetings—he began to defend my playing. Not with words about feelings, but with technical observations. He would say, "When Melody takes the phrase, watch her breath. She anticipates the rhythm, but sometimes she rushes the downbeat. Give her a beat and let the phrase bloom."
Those words did more than shield me; they taught other people to see me as a capable presence.
There were obstacles. My family's shameful reputation for "white-funeral songs" was not entirely erased. People still snickered about my roots. Some teachers frowned at my "unpolished past." I turned their scorn into fuel. When a particular senior musician sneered that my stage background was too theatrical, I performed the cleanest passage I'd ever played in class. Notes curved like answers, pitch solid as pillars.
"You did well," River said afterward, and for a moment he looked at me with something that almost admitted more than appreciation.
"Did you ever imagine," I asked him one night, "that a suona could be tender?"
He smiled, small and private. "Maybe just in the right hands."
That, too, was a heart-moment: the idea that my loudness could be shaped into tenderness, and that someone like River would acknowledge it.
Time bent like a harmony. We began to grow closer in the slow and sure way of two players learning a duet. There were missteps—arguments about phrasing, a jealous comment from a famous visiting singer that River ignored, a rumor that tried to paint our collaboration as something scandalous. Our connection survived because it was constructed from shared work and mutual stubbornness.
But the most turning moment came in public. I had worked for months to be invited to a showcase—a performance that could define a season. The conservatory announced that the city festival would host an evening of classical folk and staged theater. The ensemble would include solos, duets, and an orchestral passage that called for the suona to step forward in a place where it might shine.
I practiced until my lips were raw. The night of the performance, the hall filled with the kind of air that makes your skin feel tight. The curtains opened and lights washed us into focus. I remember thinking: this is for everyone who ever thought my kind of music was merely a sideshow.
We began; the halls responded. At one moment, a tricky passage approached where I had to hold a high, sustained note while the ensemble carried a slow, pulsing rhythm. If I held, it would hang like a bell. If I cracked, it would sound like a joke.
I closed my eyes and breathed River's teaching: slowly, like river water filling a vase.
The note hung. It was not only held; it was true. When I finished, the audience exhaled as if they had been holding it, too. Later, people would tell me they had forgotten to breathe until my note reminded them.
After the show, as yet another chorus of applause rolled through the hall, River found me backstage. He had makeup streaked faintly along his cheek from quick touches. He looked as if he'd been carved out of light and concentration.
"You did that," he said simply.
"I did," I agreed. I felt a dangerous kind of pride.
People began to talk in different tones. Students asked for tips. Teachers nodded when I walked by. My family called and cried with joy. Felix stole me a slice of cake and shoved it into my hands with the pride of a man who'd placed a bet and won.
River and I stepped away from the crowd. I thought he'd say something dramatic. Instead, he folded me a small, awkward smile and said, "Melody, in public you were fearless."
"Because I had practice," I said. "And you had faith."
His gaze softened. "You gave the note its honor."
I reached out and tucked a stray curl behind River's ear. He closed his eyes for a heartbeat, a private surrender. Around us, students recorded the scene on their phones, whispered admirations like confetti. Nobody clapped; they didn't need to. The world felt full.
"Will you—" I started.
"Will I what?" he asked, voice low.
"Keep teaching me," I finished. "Keep being you, and let me be me."
He looked at my hand in his, at the faint smudge of stage makeup on my thumb. "Yes," he said. "But not only teacher and pupil. Let us be partners. Let us be two people who bring out the best in each other."
He said it as if it were a line in a play. I answered like a fool in love.
"Yes," I said.
We kissed once later, awkwardly, tender in the hallway where the janitor pushed a cart and pretended not to notice. I think the first kiss between two performers is always a little bit like a rehearsal—a testing of tempo, a negotiation of breath. When it ended, the corridor felt new.
I tell you all this to be honest with how things grew. A lover and a musician can be the same person; River taught me how the stage could keep two flourishing things together. We had small fights—about rehearsal schedules, about pride on the stage—but we also had dinners on the rooftop and quiet mornings where he helped me tune like a patient man.
The bloom of that blue velvet flower lived in my case for months, a ridiculous relic of the night I collided with him. He once asked me if I still had it.
"You kept it?" he asked.
"Of course," I said. "It's lucky."
He pretended not to believe in such nonsense, then pressed his forehead to it—not touching, just a shadow of a gesture—like a person who keeps charms without admitting it.
One day a scandal tried to pry us apart. A visiting troupe misinterpreted a rehearsal and leaked a rumor that River favored me for reasons beyond music—that I had used connections to get a place. The rumor, silly as it was, gathered wind. I felt my ears burn. There were whispers in the halls again, now about me and my family.
River confronted the rumor in public. "She's earned every note she plays," he said in the careful way he had when speaking to reviewers. "If anyone claims otherwise, let them show me they can hold a phrase as steadily under pressure."
He did not flare with drama. He stood tall and useful and, in the end, the scandal died in the steady light of truth and technical demonstration. I think that public defense was one of the deepest kindnesses he gifted me: he was willing to put his reputation beside mine and say, plainly, "This musician belongs here."
We existed then as a duet: two persons practicing closeness and craft. Friends teased us. I teased him back. We had small competitions about who could warm up faster. I would play a raucous suona riff and he would counter with a perfect trilling line on his singing, making us both laugh. People said we matched like instruments next to one another.
"You're my suona," he would sometimes say, dramatic and very River. "Loud and honest."
"And you're my silk sleeve," I replied, "graceful and terribly precise."
He put his hand over mine and we would stand there, two odd little pieces of music fit together.
There were also the quiet nights when nothing special happened. Those were my favorite. Sitting on the dorm roof, looking at the city lights, he told me stories about his parents and their huge expectations. I told him about the time my aunt pretended to be dead on the road because she wanted to elicit a better performance from my father—and how the crowd had laughed and cried simultaneously. He laughed until he almost snorted.
"Your family," he said, "is theatrical in its own genius."
"My family is honest," I said. "We sing for life and death."
"Sounds like good training," he said, tucking his arm through mine.
Slowly, people stopped seeing us as an odd pair and started seeing us as a team.
Later, at a big festival, River accepted an award. In his speech, he thanked the conservatory, his teachers, and—unexpectedly—"the suona player who kept me grounded." I felt blood rush to my face. He looked at me like his words had been meant only for me. Cameras caught it. Students cheered. My heart felt like someone had thrummed a big, resonant note inside my ribs.
When he won the prize, people included my name in the same breath. That was when the whole thing felt real.
We kept playing together, learning how to breathe in sync. People who had once shrugged at my suona began inviting me to play in small ensembles. My family came to watch in the conservatory's smaller halls, and the elders wept with the kind of wails that include joy and astonishment. They said we had re-written the idea of where our music could go.
We had tender times and practical times; we were lovers and colleagues. We argued once fiercely: about an interpretation of a scene where I wanted it loud and comedic and he wanted the hidden sorrow. We almost didn't speak for a week.
"You've changed my phrasing," I accused.
"You've changed my intention," he said.
In the end, we found a common ground by letting laughter and grief share the stage. We came back to one another, not erasing the fight but soothed by it.
Now, whenever I carry my suona case across the conservatory, the blue velvet flower sits near the reed case like a little badge. Sometimes I touch it and think of the night we collided, of the absurd beginning—how I tripped and how the stiff perfect person of River Schneider paused and looked.
"Why did you keep that flower?" he asked me once, peering at it.
"It reminds me of the day a Dan called me blind," I said.
He closed his eyes and shook his head as if to ward off the memory. "I remember," he said softly. "And I remember you picking up pride like a thing on the floor and refusing to let it lie there. You played that night with your whole history behind you."
"Your history isn't small either," I said.
He smiled, the kind that lives somewhere in between public polish and private mischief. "Neither is yours."
We had built a life where a silly loud suona and a silk-clad performer could fit side by side. We were both stage creatures, both wound up in a shared reverence for the music and the audience. The conservatory had given me a ladder; River had taught me how to climb like a performer who could stay upright even in storms.
One night, after a small graduation performance, students lingered under the lights on the front steps. We were holding hands, our fingers interlaced like a score with bars and rests. I reached into my pocket, found the blue velvet flower, and held it up. The campus quieted like a room waiting at the end of an aria.
"Do you remember?" I asked.
He looked, and his face softened. "I do. You fell into the path of someone making his way."
"And you made a hand to steady me," I said.
He knelt on one knee, not with scripted grandeur but with a real clumsy sincerity that made people around us laugh and clap.
"Will you keep playing with me?" he asked, and his voice only trembled a little.
"Yes," I said, leaning forward. I kissed him so hard I tasted stage makeup and a promise. The crowd cheered. Someone recorded us. Later, we would look back on the video and laugh at how unpracticed our kiss had been.
We married under a stage curtain, because we always felt more at home with lights than with sunlight. My family performed parts of the ceremony between songs. River wore a white costume trimmed in blue; I wore something that let me move freely between dance and blow.
We kept making music. We kept making each other better. We kept the blue velvet flower tucked in the suona case like a private relic of absurd fate.
Years later, in small hall conversations or when students asked me how I met my husband, I tell the story the same way: "I ran into him," I say, "and then I tripped. He called me blind. I kept the flower."
River, always exact, will sometimes correct me when I tell it too floridly: "You weren't blind," he'll say with a half smile. "You were dazzled."
We both were. We both still are.
The End
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