章節 53: Tomorrow's Rhythm
Night had settled over the Bronx like a velvet curtain, the kind that would someday part before me at Madison Square Garden. From the roof of our building, the city lights blurred into a familiar constellation – a map of dreams I'd already lived once but was now redrawing. The demo tape in my hands felt heavier than its plastic weight, loaded as it was with sounds stolen from a future I was desperately trying to reshape.
The track I'd finished that morning pulsed through my headphones:
*Time is a loop, a beat that never ends
Future echoes in a past that bends
Every choice a remix of what could be
Every moment a chance to set the melody free*
*[Chorus]*
*Walking backwards through tomorrow
Dancing with memories not yet made
Every step a chance to borrow
From a future starting to fade*
The production was dangerous – perhaps too ahead of its time. The minimalist trap beats wouldn't exist for years, the synthesizer patches were from software still unwritten, and the vocal processing technique wouldn't be discovered until 2012. But there was something pure in it, something that spoke to both timelines at once.
My phone buzzed – a flip phone, archaic compared to the devices I remembered, yet somehow more real in its simplicity. Rico's message was brief: "Hot97 wants to play it tomorrow morning. You ready?"
Ready. The word echoed through both my histories like a delayed sample. In my first life, I hadn't been ready when opportunity knocked. I'd played it safe, stuck to the formulas, and spent years climbing a ladder I now knew had a shorter route to the top. But success wasn't just about the destination – it was about who you became along the way.
I texted back: "Let it ride."
The night air carried the distant thump of car stereos, each one a reminder of how music flowed through the city's veins. Somewhere out there, Beyoncé was probably in a studio, laying down tracks for her next album. In my original timeline, we wouldn't meet for another seven years. Now, if everything played out right, our paths would cross much sooner. The thought sent a shiver through me that had nothing to do with the autumn chill.
Behind me, the roof access door creaked open. Mother's footsteps were soft, but I recognized their rhythm – the same one I'd sampled for a beat in 2016, in a life that now existed only in my memory.
"Your father used to come up here too," she said, settling beside me with two cups of café con leche. "When the music in his head got too loud to sleep."
I accepted the cup, letting its warmth seep into my palms. "What did he do when the music was trying to tell him something he wasn't sure the world was ready to hear?"
She was quiet for a long moment, looking out over the city that had shaped us both. "He played it anyway. Said the world catches up to truth eventually." She turned to me, her eyes reflecting the city lights. "That's what's happening with you, isn't it? You're hearing something the rest of us can't yet."
In more ways than she could imagine. "What if it changes everything, Ma?"
"Mi amor," she smiled, the same smile I'd see years later at my first Grammy win, "everything is already changing. I see it in you. The way you move like you're dancing to a rhythm from another time. The way you write like you've already lived these stories."
I pulled off my headphones and offered them to her. "Want to hear what tomorrow sounds like?"
She slipped them on, and I watched her face as the track played – the subtle widening of her eyes, the slight nod as she caught the beat, the moment of recognition when the bridge hit. These were the same expressions I'd seen in 2024, when I'd played her the original version of this song. Now, twenty years early, it felt like a prophecy fulfilling itself.
"It's beautiful," she said finally, handing back the headphones. "But it's not just tomorrow I'm hearing. It's you. All of you. Like you've finally stopped hiding who you are."
I swallowed hard. If she only knew how much I was still hiding, how many versions of myself existed in the space between now and then. "Think the world's ready for it?"
She wrapped an arm around me, and for a moment I was both the teenager she saw and the man I remembered being. "The world's never ready for the future, hijo. That's why we need people brave enough to bring it anyway."
Below us, the city pulsed with millions of heartbeats, each one marking time in their own way. Tomorrow, Hot97 would play my track, and the timeline would shift again. But sitting there with Mother, watching the lights of a city caught between my past and future, I realized that some rhythms remain constant across all possible futures.
The demo tape in my hands held tomorrow's sound, but the moment – this moment – was perfectly now.
每周推薦票狀態
-- 推薦票
榜單 
-- 推薦票