Music and Words

A piano playing soft allowed an aire of sweet melody to escape from the soul of the pianist. Lifts and lilts and warm tones so peaceful spread carried high by cascading currents of emotions. In a room filled with the faint scent of incense the heart shaped pattern of the music emerged. 

A young man clad in blue jeans and a Martin Strings t-shirt heard the music. Alone and simply walking by the performance space he was seduced by the purity of sound. From a room large enough for a small concert but currently empty of anything but the piano at one end and a few chairs close to the door at the other end the music poured out. The sound just grabbed the soul of this passerby. 

The lid to the piano was up and the one man audience was obscured from the view of the performer. He had entered the room as quietly as a cat.

Summoning years of emotions bottled up inside of her heart and head she let delicate fingers find their way to press those keys evoking a romanticism of the real. The sole member of the audience felt a connection to a soul exploding both with joy and longing. Each note carried laughter and loss. 

As each peak and ebb of the music passed he scribbled with the pencil that had been stuffed in his notebook’s pocket onto its lined paper.  Words flowed out.

Flowers

Rain

Eternity

A heart’s burden

Connection

Acceptance

Surrender

The pianist was lost in her own world.  Pure feeling was flowing out into all that the strings and dead trees and ivories could loose from her soul.  She played with her eyes closed not thinking thoughts constructed from the artifice of words.  She played with lightness of pure feeling.

Words first fell upon the paper and then words became lines and lines became verses and choruses, stanzas and refrains.  He scrawled and erased and struggled for synonyms and argued with himself over the couplets and the meter.  But it all flowed as easily as the music flowed from the pianists hands, mostly.

Eventually the music peaked and grew soft. It peaked again but now not quite as loud. Then it grew soft with strong but subtle chords. The writer placed his pencil back in the flap inside his notebook. Very quietly he stood up and headed for the door. As he headed out he heard the coda and then it was done.

She never knew he was there. 

He worked that poem for months to resolve the mostly.  Then he set it aside.  After a year he returned to the work and stared at it for hours.  He wasn’t happy, the words were not the perfection that the music had been.  He thought he would take a stab at a verb tense change or a different adjective but he eventually gave up.  If he changed any single thing more in the poem he might lose the memory of a perfect moment.

He became the writer he had planned to be when he had started carrying around those little ringed binders.  He worked in prose and published op-ed pieces.  He sold his work and he dreamed that eventually he would get a story in the New Yorker but that was a goal, not an end. As the years went by he would come back to that poem again and again and each time he was in that room anew. He never shared the poem. The poem was his and he rebuilt the room and the sound each time he ran his eyes across those lines.

As the years went by she never abandoned the piano.  She made money from her gift.  She played well and found her way onto a few CDs as a backing player.  She played in support of musical theatre productions and grand affaires. She loved her music and it showed.  But she would often return to thoughts of that day when in a sunlight filled empty hall she had sat down at a piano and let everything that was in her flow out.  She knew to herself that was the best she had even given and the best the piano had ever yielded for her.  She savored that she had a moment which belonged to her like that.  .Her only regret was that no one had been there to share in her accomplishment.