“I let life get twisted. Get worn out, torn up, and late with the rent. And now nothing makes sense except the bench and that piano, a feeling nearing order when I’m pressing down the chords.” And he plays, and it swells and breaks, but what’ll it take to make my life sound like that? It brings a fever, a dream of sweat and ecstasy. A kiss on every hammer hit that follows as the keys fall down and bring an order first, then chaos, then a calm, that paints every shift in murals on the wall.
And it presses to your neck, it clutches to your hips, softly sings to you of fireworks and God and art and sex and it’s strange- That it feels so right when nothing else does.
But all the while he’s playing there’s a humming coming up and through the window from outside. And even he has to admit a certain melody in it, but then why can’t he harmonize? It’s like the city’s got it’s own song but he can’t play along. He sees the notes as they fly by but always plays them wrong. And in the bathroom it gets blurry, gets warm and distorted, like light pushed the orange of the pillbox he poured in his palm. It falls to the floor, he smiles as it hits.
I used to be that person who read two 400-page books a week. Now I carry around a book with me everywhere I go to try and remember what it feels like to feel that connection within the pages because I can’t concentrate to read further than a paragraph, or remember it, for that matter. Every time I see someone engrossed in a novel, it’s bittersweet, because I miss what it is like to get lost in the written word. I just want to be able to read like that again.
