我傻嗎？[original fiction]
She hadn’t touched her piano for two years when she comes back home for Christmas break.
The piano sits in the living room, a reminder of her passed accomplishments (and failures, because like everything else– she didn’t stick with it). All the award certificates in cherry wood frames hang above it and guilt seeps into her bones every time she looks up.
Four days into break, she pulls out the bench and clumsily attempts to play Michael Nyman’s “The Heart Asks for Pleasure First” by ear but gives up after a few measures. The piano needs tuning– badly, and she’s forgotten too much in two years to play it adequately. The tone of the instrument is still hauntingly beautiful, her heart constricts every time she remembers that it’s stuck in her home where no one can appreciate it and wonders briefly, if she should try selling it on craigslist.
Rachmanioff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, she still remembers. Or at least, she still remembers the first movement because it was one of her performance pieces. Plus she could hear bits and quotes of the piece in some of Muse’s music (and thank god for technology and digital downloads because her Absolution CD would be in pieces by now, she listens to their music too often nowadays).
She tries again, and this time– she’s getting somewhere.
It’s not until she hits a sour note that she realizes that her father has been watching her from the doorway, his expression pensive but not angry.
“You were always pretty good at that, ” he comments. “I’ve always wondered why you stopped.”
For the rest of break, she tinkers with tired melodies and scribbles cheesy lyrics in her moleskine notebook about missed opportunities and mixed up emotions.
The day before she leaves for school, her dad has the piano tuned.
(“For next time,” he says brusquely, and she knows he means ’spring break’.)
She’s touched by his gesture, but she hopes that by the time April rolls around, she would have gotten all of this out of her system.
Music was merely a convenient outlet.
Leave a Reply