I'll take care of you

Tomorrow I turn 23, and then the day after I'm leaving you. Usually, at this time of the year, I would be lounging around, agitated at getting older for no real reason other than the fact that my grip on youthful lenience and forgiveness gets slightly looser while the vast openness of life ahead of me scoots slightly closer, shrinking. Half a year now of quelling the jittering itch that I'm closer to getting older than staying the same age, and it comes down to only a day's difference, venerated and exalted within. It's always dreadful.

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For so long we didn't have a great relationship. Back then there were days where the certainty that I would one day go to college and get away from you was the only thing that could comfort me. And when those days came, I didn't call often; our messages are filled with links of videos and movies that you shared with me, that you thought I would like. I think now of how treasured it is that you thought of me and wanted me to see everything too.

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A year ago, I turned 22 and you baked me a cake from scratch. Yesterday you wanted to shop together and buy me something for tomorrow. Today I asked you for pots and pans that I could bring with me and you dug deep into our pantry and gave freely. There are thousands of these occasions littered across the years of my life. I think of them now and I wonder how stupid I must be to not respond to your texts with the utmost attention, to not give back, to care about things other than spending the time we have together well. How I could even imagine moving away.

 

There's an image in my head I can't quiet down. It's when I'll say goodbye and drive out of our garage, and you'll come back to our home and sit in your room and be alone. My chest cracks and I can't breathe, and I know that I've both grown older and younger when I understand that this is what love breeds: an inescapable, stinging pain within that hurts when you hurt and sings when you sing and knows one day this will be a different kind of ache. I realize now how lucky I am to be this old to comprehend it.

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How lucky I am to feel this pain, buried deeply, permanently, giving me life. And with this all forms the conviction that I'll take care of you when you're older. One day I know I will lose more than I will the day after tomorrow, and that loss will be permanent — and so before then, I want to give you light and joy and myself, because I love you.

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Published 7/17/2021.

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Cloths of heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths, enwrought with golden and silver light, the blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: but I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

 

Yeats was speaking to his muse but I'm speaking to God: please handle me gently. 12/31/2020.

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Loving Tchaikovsky

I came back home. Almost half a decade had gone by, and things were different, but still very much the same. 

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For one, I had learned to love Tchaikovsky. 

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It wasn't me, falling asleep in the stiff, uncomfortable chair of the concert hall that I was forced into — twisted sideways with my right leg tucked underneath me, hands coming up to pillow my head, praying silently that the concerto droning on in the background would be one of the shorter ones. It wasn't me, getting up yet again from the stool in front of our piano, making the excuse of needing to use the restroom to shave off five minutes of practice time, hating the sonata I was learning, wondering how everything could sound the same — boring, and so damn classical, I wanted nothing more than to peel it off me like a layer of dead skin.

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No, it was me, listening to the pieces again, years later, just because I happened across them and wanted to. I chose to. And how everything changed, because of something as simple as that: wanting to.

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God, how could the same piece be so devastatingly different? I finally heard, at long last, the piercing sweetness of Tchaikovsky's melodies, how the notes pulled at my heart, how they felt like they were telling me something bigger than what we could write with words. I felt him speak. And I couldn't get enough, the sound too perfect, too good to only listen through within the constraints of time, disappearing into the wind after. I wanted to reach out with my grubby hands and grab at this invisible beauty, bring it to my mouth and swallow it down whole, keeping it within me, savoring it. 

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After, I felt this wrenching jealousy of those able to perform these concertos. Childishly, I wanted it too, to be able to play something so achingly honest and raw and lovely. I went back on my decision to quit the piano, thinking my mother to be right, that I should have stuck out practicing the sonatas I didn't understand and passing the CM evaluations I cared nothing about.

 

But no, that wasn't right, was it? The same person can learn to hear something differently. Just as the same person can come back to an old place, a place they were years ago, distinct, with a new air of honesty around them, knowing that the time they took was worth it. The ship of Theseus: I am rebuilt, painted and varnished in the way I choose, sailing in the same waters but wholly different.

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So I sit in the worn stool, fingers sliding along the familiar keys, relishing in the way I am now — struggling to read music, using too much pedal, wincing at the dissonance as my hands fail to find the right notes. I maybe could have played Tchaikovsky ages ago, if I had continued. And yet it is important that I am here now, exactly as I am, having done exactly as I have done. I wouldn't have been able to understand the music otherwise.

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Published 8/3/2020.