I sit and play the piano. I play until I start to get it right. I'm not nearly where I want to be when it comes to decoding those black lines and dots on paper, but I tell myself that there's always someone worse than me, or someone older who is just beginning.
It is at this point that a hard knot forms in my stomach becuase this is when I would call my grandma and ask her if I could play her a song. I would tell her that it needed a lot of work but she would happily listen anyway. I would set the phone upright on the piano and it would be as though she were sitting right there with me, watching my fingers play on the keys, tapping her foot...my human metronome.
Just as she was in the photograph of her and 11-year old me squeezed together on the piano bench months after my biological dad had suddenly died. Beauty for ashes. Always. I hadn't seen her in years and there I was in her living room playing Nadia's Theme from The Young and the Restless. It felt like I had found home base.
Just as she was in my living room, two babies crawling through our legs as we played one last song together, her fingers trembling from the years of fighting Parkinson's. She looked at me and said with a shaky smile, "I think that's it for me." And we never played together again.
It's nights like tonight that the achey missing settles in...because no matter how fragmented your song is, you still want to bang it out, and even more than that, you want someone else to share all of the broken pieces with.
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