Opus 37

I’m really feeling music today. It could possibly be my radically enhanced emotional state, not much altered even by the slight overdose on Midol I might have had this morning.

Or it could just be that music is what brings life to my veins and thus oxygen to my brain and clarity to my eyes and richness to my senses. It always has, after all. I’ve been ignoring music; skulking around, hiding behind corners when I see it coming. And I’m not sure why. 

I’ve just been so afraid lately. But it’s hard to say exactly what I’m afraid of. Maybe it’s nothing. That is, maybe I’m scared of dissolving into nothingness. Amounting to nothing. Being nothing. Or at least not being what I always dreamed I would be and what I’m now doing nothing to become. And returning to the piano with stiff, forgetful fingers and forcefully shaking my startled voice awake, which comes out creaky from neglect, is scary when I’m already so scared.

And yet, today I’m craving only one of those magical corners with a small open window and eighty-eight slightly dusty keys. They’ve always been such a refuge- such a sanctuary- waiting patiently to absorb every moment of disappointment or frustration or euphoria with life and its potential for being lived. It’s all there in those keys and my fingers that know them so well, even if they’re a little awkward at first reuniting. But like any true friends, they soon know they never really spent time apart, after all. They quickly remember one another’s idiosyncrasies; their shortcomings and their greatest abilities. Their mutual desire to produce something worth listening to. Worth getting lost in. Worth feeling.

So I sit here in this stark, florescent box of a facility, as far away from that corner as you could really get, listening to the genius of Dustin O’Halloran and Iris Litchfield with itching fingers. RLS bouncing my knees all over the place under my desk, my feet blindly bumbling around, searching for the pedals. But my insides feel warm and sparkly with the anticipation of greeting one of my oldest and dearest friends. Perhaps the most loyal friend of all, always waiting patiently, always knowing that someday I’ll come back to raise the blinds and crack open the rain streaked window, to stroke the old worn oak bench, lift the cover, inhale a deep, nervous breath, arrange my cold, frightened fingers into the key of G and…

Play.

-Banana 

 [These photos are from a  special day in Hawaii about a year and a half ago. Taken by Bremen McKinney and me and featuring Tessa Brady and my hands, feet, and occasional indiscernible reflection]