Every time I am home I notice the piano out of the corner of my eye. It lies in wait. It creeps up upon me when I’m not paying attention to anything in particular. The piano snags on my conscious, it catches; it forces me to pause. When I finally give in I want to give in with every atom of my being, to sit and play and never again stand, never leave until I have trained my now-clumsy fingers to catch what I used to be, what I still hear in my mind. It is an ache of the deepest and most thoroughly felt kind. The piano sits like a confessional; I approach it as one with a back bent heavy by grievances and transgressions, wishing for myself only bleak absolution.
When I think of the moments that have altered irrevocably my life – the birth of my sister, which I still remember in odd details, like the word “holler” and the eating of raisin bran; when I first glimpsed S and thought he would be one of those people I would regret not knowing better; even down to four months ago, when I lay awake in a darkened room in the emergency ward of the UCLA hospital and I thought to myself that this was the first time I had come so consciously close to death – when I think of those moments, I think of music most of all. And I think of how I might have been better, might indeed have wasted so much time and darkly sinking pleasure.
Now it is three in the morning and all I can think of is the first time I heard the orchestral suite of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, in Orchestra Hall in The Cities, during Zommerfest, sort of a fluke of concert-going during high school, with my parents and sister and perhaps (probably) my best friend at the time (whom, it should be noted, I now miss often and deeply, and I wish we could have retained that proximity, so let that be a lesson to you who read this, to hold fast to those you will probably lose with time).
We heard the orchestral suite of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and it was the first time in my young life that my heart, my heart of heart, was ripped from my chest. The deep and delirious swathes of melody, the sighing of the strings, the pounding, pounding, pounding deep within the soul of the earth, the very core, those notes which come as close as I think is possible to the words themselves for expressing the hidden horror of life and love and death, the relentless void into which we all try so courageously not to trip – it was a glimpse of the end, for me, then, the very end of things.
And that I think altered profoundly who I was then and has been working upon me ever since to turn me towards not simply whom I have become but whom I wish I might have been.
I can’t tell you how much it was like a hammer, at my breastbone; a hand, reaching in; fingers closing upon my very life and soul; and how swift the exit, little more than an exhalation but drawing with it all the naivety I had latched upon for those early years.
I think often of how our daily existence is like wool stretched upon a skrim, and how on occasion the wool gets rubbed thin in places, and how it is to peer through those little holes, into the vastness of the thing beyond.
