Before the keys.

I am sitting on a bench that could also be called a stool, and I am perched above a set of piano keys. There are 88 keys on a full keyboard and they shine like teeth cut by mountain air and before I can begin to play I have to speak to them.

This is not a real piano in the sense that these keys are connected to electric circuits and parts that barely move. It is a piano in theory - it is connected to the idea of a piano in much the same way that I am connected to the idea of a human being. Perhaps that is the source of the emotion that begins as a hard knot of twine in my heart, when I place my fingers on the keys and gently press down.

I am playing now, a warm up to remind my fingers that they are not simply for show, they are not there to give the tailor an idea of where to place the cuff. Here, in this room, they are working. They have been employed and I am making sure that I get my money's worth from their tired backs - arched joints a bridge between hand and key. That bridge attaches itself to the base of another bridge - one between key and mind, between our ears and the song that we are singing. It is amazing that we can sing with our fingers, and I think about Sarah or Giulia because that is what they do naturally. I am taking lessons to learn how to do something that other people can simply DO, and it strikes me that this is not a bad goal to have. There is another shining thread in the room between what I am playing and what I am thinking I am playing, so I watch it sing under tension while the song continues. I cannot imagine the song ending but I know that it will, soon. Everything will end too soon, and that shining thread will fade away into the boxed in corners of a room, where music changes the warp and weft of the boards that shape a room. That room holds me in its palm and I know that I am being shaped by that song as well.

If enough harmony echoes through my bones, will I somehow become harmonious? If enough music plays through flesh to flesh, will I one day become music itself, that quicksilver remedy for fear and pain, that brooding antigen for love? I can't know that answer - I can't know that I have changed when the change occurs so slowly as to seem like nothing at all. We know ourselves only briefly and only when we are left and leaving. That is the honest truth about our song, the ones that beat against our ribs, a hummingbird fading away in a cage. Our cages are found outside of this room, outside of what we have made.

The song ends. I let my fingers come to rest and then begin to play again. I know that I will do this over and over until it sounds right, until I know that it is correct without having to bridge those gaps again. My fingers are stiff and cold and they move like dancers and I let them.

-Rich

somehow you knew that we would give up