beat / melody

(Please note this work isn't finished and will likely stay that way.)

Artistry is your mother’s greatest weapon, greatest song. You are five when you first touch a piano- she hires a tutor a week later. The glory in this gesture is how you agreed. After all, you wanted to be just like your mama, fingers gracing the keys, painting the air with art and love. Yes- you wanted to be just like her.

You are six when your mother decides you’re ready for your first recital. An hour before, she straightens your hair and kisses you on the cheek: You’ll make me proud, dear love. I promise. She laughs, and the heart sinking to your stomach lurches. Yet you say: Okay.

You make no mistakes that day- your melody, simple and true. Your mama is in the first pew, and she claps, face lit up. The shine in her eyes makes the butterflies disperse- or maybe sink lower. But you smile, bow, and take your seat.

From then on, your piano tutor starts coming every other day. He assigns you new pieces every week, and you learn them all obediently, hands deft and practiced. Your mother sits in, often falling asleep to the sound of your work. The sight makes your chest warm- your accomplishments are mounting to something, after all. Your skill level is slowly approaching hers, and every night you hear her grace the keys before bed. A sonata here, a tune from your childhood there. It’s breathtaking- you’d give anything to sound like that, to be like that. In your mind’s eye, she had mastered the art. Yet she tells you often: You are on your way to mastery yourself, dear love. And well. Is she wrong?

You are eight when you win for the first time. The elation thrums between your knuckles, a heartbeat of its own.

The first time you freeze up in a performance is when you are twelve years old. You are auditioning, or competing, or something of that sort; the sort where all eyes are waiting for you to fumble. And you do. Your heartbeat flails for a fragile moment mid-piece, and you are overcome with the sudden sensation that you cannot breathe. Yet it ends as soon as it begins, and the silence is stronger than the preceding song. You start up again- of course you do - but it is not quite the same. You finish, exiting the stage with a strange feeling behind your wrists. Your mother looks confused. You feel like crying, suddenly, but you don’t know if you can.

It doesn’t happen again for a while, and your walls glimmer with the gold of success. Or maybe it is accomplishment- it feels too empty anyways, and you don’t know what prize will fix it. In the moments when your mother isn’t home, you find yourself at the bench automatically, playing dissonant chords into a broken melody. It is sad, simple- unoriginal. Worst of all, they are not beautiful, nor are they the art your mother weaves out of wit and vision at night.

They are yours, though, in a world full of things that are not. And for now, that will have to be enough.

You are fourteen when you first consider quitting piano, after an announcer calls your name and the audience claps politely. It is a national honor to win something like this. Your mother is cheering too, crying a bit. Once upon a midnight you might have cried at the chance to make her proud too. Right now, though, you are tired. You can no longer hear the melody, or even the heartbeat. Yet you come up to the stage, shake the announcer’s hand. Take your bows. Smile automatically. On the plane ride back home, though, you find yourself repeatedly touching your chest. You think you are looking for a sign of a pulsing thrum, a sign you are alive. Your fingers come back cold, and you are not surprised anymore.

You tell your mother at sixteen, and she cries for a long, long, time. And the relieving thing, the sorrowful thing, is: your mother doesn’t shout in a blaze of anger, but shuts herself away for hours upon days. You do not understand, but you do- the art she so treasures you are throwing away without a second glance. And once upon a midnight, you would have been horrified at the thought. Music is in your blood, entwined between childhood and memory. What would you be without it? Yet a question comes anyways, in wary mornings as you stare at your reflection in the mirror: What am I with it, anyways?

And so the piano gathers dust, a dreary layer of grey upon once pristine keys. You never meant for her to stop, but when you tucked away your sheet music into a forlorn attic, your mother tucked away that part of her heart as well. It confuses you, her not playing- and you ask her about it, once. The refusal to continue to melody. So your mother looks at you with grieving eyes, and takes your fingers gently, pressing your thumbs against your heart, then hers. You don’t know what you’re supposed to feel, so you pull away (and you only see her hollow eyes for a moment)- but you inspect your thumbs a lot that night. 

You take down your trophies, medals, certificates. They don’t mean anything anymore, though you suppose they hadn’t for a long time.

You were never quite as academic as you were musical, you will admit, so you end up going to some nowhere college in a nowhere place. But it’s fine. It’s fine, because the melody had been lost years ago. You stand at crossroads with no gilded twine, no pulsing heartbeat to guide you. It’s foggy.

You are tired.

You are twenty when she dies. Your father (how dare he) calls you on the phone, tells you the news flatly. Once upon a midnight, you might have cried; your fingers turn towards your chest again, begging for something, anything. It is cold. Your chest rings hollow. 

You hang up and go to sleep.

Your aunt texts you a week later, asking if you could play the piano at the funeral.

So you return home, dust off the piano, retrieve the sheet music from the attic. Finger a tentative note, and then another into the clarity of the morning. A memory flashes: your face innocent, hers shining.

You look up, and it is well into the afternoon. Later, you fall asleep on the couch, and it smells like sonatas performed at dusk.

But here is the tragedy- you tried. Yes, you tried, you really did. But your hands were too shaky, too stiff, for it to be anything close to art anyways. Your aunt pats you gently, hand on the phone. She is calling a for-hire pianist, and you don’t think your mother would have wanted that. Then again, when have your choices ever been ones she’s wanted?

The funeral is nice, you guess. The pianist made no flaw, but the melody did not reverbate as hers did. You look away from the coffin as you pay your respects and leave before lunch starts. You’re on the plane again within the week.

So you are twenty three when it hits you fully. You had graduated with a degree in something that didn't hit too close to home- history, or something like it. There you are, getting in the car after working 9 to 6 at the office, turning on the radio, when you realize yesterday was her birthday. It hits you then, a surge of what some people would call grief. She’d use some other word in a lovely language she never thought to teach you, a word you vaguely understood not as sadness but as longing- regret and love and wistfulness; a promise repeated over and over under roofs and sky and sun, not through words but through heartbeats and thumbs. The melody did not say: look at me, ma, you’d be proud; because would she be proud, really? No, not that, but something like: 

know me promise me come back come back let me feel your pulse again your symphony again your thumbs under mine

Well, you return to your old house a week later, unsure of what to expect. Maybe the melody will still echo silent. Maybe the heartbeat will never come home. And yet. The bench is pulled forward, hands poised unsure and unsteady. There is no choice, you think, somewhat bitterly, somewhat thankfully, but to move on. To move on and continue the symphony, the song, the sonata. To finish hers, even, and start your own. 

(unfinished transition. poorly executed.)

Your thumb presses the middle C, and then again. Another. In and out, dear love. Press forward, in and out. 

It fills your lungs- do you understand this? You are alive and breathing under brilliant skies and gentle dirt. This is the heartbeat, the sonata. The melody she dedicated her life to. The melody she tried to teach you. And she failed, didn’t she? Or maybe you failed- you never understood, but neither did she. This careful dance of burden and blame will not lead anywhere, you think. In the end, it led to the same place anyways.

Try a chord now, dear love- dear dreamer. Press forward. Hear it ring deep within your chest. Oh, the well has been empty for so long now. Aren’t you ready to fill it with something new?

In and out, dear love.

In and out.