The Classical Piano Blues
You lifted that slim blue pen that has been untouched for months now on the table by your bed. And now the small size notebook you got from an old good friend of yours. You decided, not long after she gifted you that A5 stack of dotted paper wrapped with blue hard cover, that it was going to be your journal. So you wouldn't lose her warm presence any time you needed a shoulder to lean on and any time you needed ears to listen to your bad day or your random blue thoughts. You wouldn't talk to anyone but her about those blues, and now that she's far, you wouldn't let a single soul hear them. My opinion: no wonder those blues tail you much longer than they used to.
With your blues placed atop your bent knees, now at the same level as your rushing heartbeat, you began writing about the one thing that keeps running back to your mind, day after day, month after month, year after year. You title it 'Why is It So Unescapable'. Brushing off thoughts on how this act feels like talking to a living being, you sighed heavily, then continued writing.
Every time I listen or look at someone playing classical piano, their hands dancing and twirling on the monochrome tiles, something inside me can't help but react. Somehow, somewhere in my heart, like the screen of a phone detecting sunlight–– pushing its brightness to near its maximum limit, making a kind of automatic setting,–– its state of being, its mood, its feels, they switch to a whole different setting. Switch, it might say if only it has mouths, or better yet, speakers, as our gadgets do.
The second my pair of earlobes picked up the tune generated by those graceful fingers swaying left and right on the piano keys, which sounded as grand as the piece title and its centuries-old composer, that unknown site in my heart feels weird, and unsettling, and a tinny part of it is, in a way, ready to fly into a rage. But it doesn't. It only became an uneasy feeling wandering round and round the contents of my heart. The feelings are mixed, folded like bread dough, and it's overly-mixed to the point that I couldn't distinguish an emotion from the other. The different emotions I know I feel, I can't tell what they are anymore.
It's not much of a change of emotions at first, but the moment I listen––not only taking it in from one earlobe and out through the other––, that's when I can actually realize how big of a U-turn it is the mind and soul is going through.
And as if all that is not complex enough, each time this happens a part of my brain decides to pay attention to the beautiful, sublime, and handsomely played the piece is. How grand, the melodies those hands are making, it would say. While another part wants to put its full attention into realizing, defining, and examining whatever is going on in the heart, whatever this weird intangible feeling is; and so they— the two minds with contrasting intuitions— part ways. Then it turns to this: in a fraction of second the monologue inside my head could go from adoring the pianist's skill and how beautiful the piece sounds, to questioning this sick, unexplainable feeling in my guts, in my chest, that i can never seem to figure the f*** out.
You would think it all ends here, but at times it could go further, more heinous than it already sounds. The heart, as if commanding the rest of the body, made them switch modes, too. Little punches in the guts, invisible forces pushing the shoulders down, and knees weakening. The body frail like a child's without its mom. Though more often than not, they last only for a bit, the body trying to brace itself the moment it notices the shift of movement.
It's been long, long since whatever happened but my brain can't seem to erase the memory and my heart can't seem to see what's actually wrong. Is it a feeling of not liking a person, or a wanting-to-revenge feeling? or is it an unfinished pain whose creator is my own self? or a lowkey-wanting-to-go-back-and-fix-whatever-happened-back-then thought? Is it something that resulted from the act of hating or loving own self?
Why does it seem, a group of notes stitched together, played by ten little dancers, extensions of the arms, make a situation feel so unescapable? So mind-calming and mind-hurting, mind triggering at the same time? When will the beautiful soul of the piece I hear going to transfer–– just a tad bit of–– its grand-ness to my mind. Perhaps it would be one hell of a grand, magnificent, era-changing feeling I will ever experience.
You close the book now and put it down––no, more like slamming it down hard, its back now pressed against the bedside table like it used to in the prior months. You didn't realize how the heat grew around you as you wrote, but what you also didn't realize, is that the heat of your blues, they are leaving off you slowly but surely, the metal cage lifting itself and slowly letting go of the blue prisoner you told me about today.