Where the Music Comes From

She sits on the solid wooden bench.  The sharp edge remains sharp beneath her thighs and urges her dammed memories to scamper across the keys, past her anxious finger tips.  Raised, curved, never flat -- her teacher would tsk at the length of her nails, which will add their tap-tap to the song.

Before the keys can sound their notes, months of tightness from neglect must be shaken loose. From the piano.  From the musician. The tinny, hollow voice of the piano soon clears as she tests the volume, the tone and the range of the sustain pedal on the instrument which has seen more days than the player.

A shaky scale, fingers tripping over one another in their eagerness to create something other than words.  (They have grown impatient of the clicking, the circuits, the artificial light.  The ergonomic plastic keys.)

Finally, their effort yields a long-forgotten language.  The mind is no longer in control.

After a clumsy arpeggio, a brisk sequence of chords--mezzo-forte--she scans the dusty pages full of Bach. 

Invention No.8 in F

She remembers and the remembering brings a smile as her left hand rests in her lap, not quite prepared for its arduous task.  The right pauses--F Major with the flat B--recalling the special steps, like in a dance.  Allegro brillante, the Latin seems to smile at her from the page as it coaxes her into the quick pace of its three-quarter time.  Her heart imitates the pulse and urges her mind to be still in the rush of sixteenth notes, rejoicing in the occasional sequence of staccato.  In the microscopic chasms--the print of her fingers--lies the map of the song.  

When the notes are near exhaustion and threaten to bow to the banality of repetition...

Prelude in C

And the left hand inhales.  The conductor is poised, ready to faithfully set the stage every two beats for the right-handed melody.  As though silver threads of the Moon were stitched into the page, the notes imitate tidal ebb and flow.  Sometimes telling of the full Moon of May, the keys celebrate in Major mezzo-piano.  But as the mist obscures her guiding light, the waves of minor triads tug at the shore.  Still, the dark shares with the light, and the two glide across the sky and the keys, one making way for the other, until the last chord signals the light of dawn.

When nothing remains but the echoes of music in her memory and the trail of tempo in her palm, the fingers resign.  They know to take to the other page.  They will record what remains of the magical time when the words were none, if only to tempt her: Return.