“Practice, practice!”

            My mother’s words get chewed up and spit out by her accent.  I can’t hear it, but from the looks some people give her when she speaks I reassuringly know that it’s still there.  As I sit on the bench she continues to yell at me from the other room, but this time I only hear the muffled resonations of ghosts.

            I slowly lift the heavy key guard.  When I was younger my mother told me that if I hit a wrong note the wood would fall across my hands and break them under its immense weight.  I know now that that won’t happen.  I don’t return the piano’s smile.  He’s old and stained, his teeth give him the grin of a pervert; discoloured and desperate. 

            Out of habit, I crack my knuckles, individually, and methodically.  Each finger gets its own twist and jerk, until the right note comes from it.  I lightly place my slender fingers over the keys.  They wait in anticipation.  Before my eyes are sheets and sheets of music, compositions written by my own hand.  These sheets once stared back at me blank, and naïve.  How far they have come.  They have the look of experience, of a life lived long ago in a far away but familiar place.  These pages have absorbed what it is to live, to love, to be.  They’re all weathered with scars and laugh lines, blemishes and veins.  Looking at them makes me want to remember something that never happened.

“I don’t hear any music!”

            That voice is what prods me out of my meditation.  I take a shallow breath and begin.  My fingers move slow at first, but hit strong and make a deep rumble in my heart.  Each note has something to say and only a short time to say it, so I try to make every individual live.  My right hand begins to speed up, tip-toeing up and down, back and forth in an intimate dance, while my left stays steady on the bass. 

            Notes take flight from the top of the old standup piano.  My hands remain steady, sure.  Before me I see each note before it’s born, but I know each one so well I intuitively navigate the keys. 

            My hands contort to form chords and the music becomes loud and tragic.  Each chord shows a different emotion.  To balance, I slow the tempo.  My right fingers drift drunkenly into a somber lullaby.  Then again in violence my left hand pounds in contrast.  It’s a fight to the death with a great struggle to a tragic end.  They both die, and meet somewhere in the middle to breathe their final words of regret.

            My hands rest still on the keys, and my body is poised into a position that the music moved me into.  I hear something behind me, but give it no attention because it’s probably criticism from my mother.  I’m satisfied.  I look at the old keys under my hands, and slowly lower the guard onto them.  I ruffle the tired sheets together in order and turn around.  My mother stands in the entryway with a great smile on her face, and mist in her eyes.  To see her like this makes me awkward at first, but then I smile. 

She’s everything I have.