(https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4n2in6Y4KWa44T45mOtze0?si=938a024078104910)
Antoneta knows the street’s refrain by heart—roaring engines, beeping, sirens, noise—as she zigzags between cars, motorbikes, and those stupid electric scooters.
Wagner-Ride of The Valkyries
The diagnosis centre shadows the pavement with its imposing darkness that promises a different tune with each new ignored symptom. With each new non-existent diagnosis.
Beethoven-5th Symphony in C Minor
She pushes the door open, grabs a number, and settles on the tired black-turned-grey leather sofa to wait. She gazes at the others; the sick, the worried, the hopeful, the hypochondriac she likes to call hyppos, and tries not to stare.
Rubinstein-2 melodies-Op3
Number 56. Antoneta rises, smiles, provides the secretary with her ID card, social security number, and prescriptions. She nods and smiles and thank yous and smiles some more before trudging upstairs.
Bach-Cello Suite No.1 in G Major
Thankfully, she doesn’t need to explain herself further on this floor because they updated the computer system six months ago, and the doctor will call her name when it’s her turn. So, she sits on yet another tired leather sofa and hopes she won’t have to wait so long and sweat so much it stains her trousers like last time.
Maurice Ravel – Boléro
Will they listen to her this time? Those tests compare her rhythm to that of a metronome, but it’s her body’s melody she’s worried about. Her body sounds out of tune.
Borodine-In the Steppes of Central Asia
Who she is to the music world is irrelevant here. Here, she’s a nobody; a middle-aged woman with grey roots wearing inexpensive clothes, a foreigner with a weird accent—the wrong accent. Not posh enough.
Telemann-Viola Concerto in G major
But when she mentions the pain and the doctor humours her with a sigh and scans where she points and finds something he can’t quite make sense of, Antoneta wishes she was a hyppo.
Satie-Gymnopédie No. 1
She could walk home, but she takes the bus because she’s in pain—again—and wants to cry—again—and life is such a bitch—again. But it’s too noisy and too hot and smelly and peopley.
Rimsky-Korsakov-Flight of the Bumblebee
She craves space. To breathe. To think. To hum her way through it all. To be.
Saint-Saëns-The Swan
She gets off two stops ahead. She needs time to digest the news before she gets home. Time to rehearse the news before she performs it in front of her family.
Tchaikovsky-Valse sentimental-Op51-No.6
All it takes is seven seconds of inattention, a Pavlovian reaction to a buzzing, a hand reaching for a phone instead of holding the handlebar, eyes focusing on an AI video instead of the road or the zebra crossing ahead.
Dvorak-Symphony No.9-IV-Finale
Antoneta knows the street’s refrain by heart—roaring engines, beeping, sirens, noise—as she zigzags between cars, motorbikes, and those stupid electric scooters.
Wagner-Ride of The Valkyries
Delphine Gauthier-Georgakopoulos is a Pushcart-nominee Breton writer, teacher, mother, nature and music lover, foodie, dreamer. She is a co-founder of The Pride Roars, and the EIC of Raw Lit. Her debut historical novel, Laundry Day, was a Novel Fair Runner-up. She lives in Athens, Greece.