Sometimes I think and ruin the things I like. It’s easy to enjoy something then become too technical and focused on a given goal or perfect execution that you lose the enjoyment that you were there for to begin with. I say I sometimes do this but I really mean often. By often I mean I do this really often. I do this with my girlfriends, with work and even with unimportant things like video games. This is why I have resolved to only think about the things that are over and done with so I can’t ruin the moment while I am in it. I can think about it later, when I’m not doing it and I am a happier person with it.
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On my twelfth birthday my father bought me a skateboard. It was a Santa Cruz board, he told me they were the best boards around. That was what stood out the most about it. He was so excited, much more than me. It infected me and I was excited too.
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When I am out to dinner with her, after the night is over and I am back home alone in my bed, I go over all the details, think about what I can do better and what I did well with. I remind myself I enjoyed the dinner too and she seemed to too and I smile, a real smile that’s in your stomach instead of your face.
This kind of thinking is okay.
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There are some things that can only be expressed by piano. There’s something in the notes, the way the keys twinkle and thrum, the way it can be light and gentle fae-touches to incredible swells of power. Inside of that there is something that speaks to me deeply. I can’t put my finger on it. I first learned to play piano in my early twenties though I had been playing various instruments and singing since ten. I wasn’t very good at it. The way the white keys and black keys were set up were completely foreign to me and I would’ve likely quit if not for the grade I needed in that class, song composition.
In class we sat in a half-circle around our instructor who sat at a piano. He’d play for us and describe those chords and how they fit in together, then get up and write out what he was saying on the whiteboard behind him. Besides him the class was silent save for the scribbling of pens on notepads.
In lab we were giving headphones and Tritons, keyboards that were several thousand dollars each. All of us had one and we were to play with the computer in front of us. It’d track us and when we finished each day’s work we were encouraged to practice, write our own music and otherwise do whatever we liked so long as it involved musical composition or the keyboard. Near the end of that class I was getting the hang of it. I was bringing in sheet music for pop songs that I liked and playing that after I was done with my work. It was nothing too difficult, but I enjoyed myself.
I was playing a song by the Goo Goo Dolls, Iris, at the end of class. It wasn’t what I wanted to play, I wanted to play Black Balloon. I had history with that song and I had been trying to play it on my guitar but couldn’t get my fingers to do what I wanted. That day I was going to try it on the piano instead. I started into the music and a phrase in the music caught me and felt so right. I kept playing (eventually messing up) but went back to it. I played it. I played it again. It had sharps and flats in it and I didn’t like using the black keys, but it just felt right, right in my chest. I started playing around with it, hitting notes at random that I thought should be there. There was a ribbon in there and I was reaching out for it, trying to grab it and pull it out. I played it differently, in different pitches, getting faster and faster, trying to find it. It was so beautiful and so sad. My fingers weren’t mine anymore. It was as if that all the time I had been forced to spend practicing had acquainted my fingers with the keyboard. They were just moving on instinct, without thought and it was gorgeous. I played my soul and my entire body was welling up and flowing into that piano. I don’t know how to describe it other than it was gorgeous. Gorgeous and sad.
It ended. I don’t know how long I was sitting there doing that. I was breathing fast and my chest ached like it does after running a race. Or holding your breath. I felt a drip on my hand and looked down dumbly. Water? I looked up at the ceiling and when I did I felt the sensation of fluid going down my chin and my neck. I touched it. Oh. I hadn’t realized I had been crying. Crying? I quickly looked around the darkened room to see if anyone had noticed, but everyone was intent on what they were doing. No one was looking at me. I looked back at my keyboard, at my hands. I wiped my face. I opened my computer program back up and went back through my exercises. I stopped bringing sheet music to class and I never tried to play on my own again.
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When I first tried to skate the board flew out from under me and I fell right back on my ass. I got angry at how ridiculous I looked. I got back on. I was wobbly but I was ready for the way the board wanted to move beneath my feet. It was simple once you got the hang of the balance. Kick, push, keep your weight in your feet instead of your hips. I eventually skated down to the end of the block, past the cul-de-sac and down that block too. I stopped to pick up my board to get over the curb. I wanted to jump it but I didn’t want to fall again, this time in public.
I learned to jump the board and learned to talk like a skater but I never went further than that. Later I gave the board away to someone I thought would enjoy it more than I would. That felt right to me.
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Last night I laid awake in a blanket-cocoon. I was worried. I say worried, but I’m deflecting. I was terrified. I had been talking to her. I adored her. Conversation had became so easy and natural that I was truly open with her. If there was anything that wasn’t spoken it was because it hadn’t come up yet or the conversation had been cut short by something outside, work, social situations and the like. It felt like our secret that no one else knew and it felt special to me. And if it felt special to me, then I must be special to her, too. That made me happy.
It didn’t occur to me that I was being so open. Do you know what I mean? Like there’s open and then there’s so open. It was intimate in the real sense of the word, not the way television commercials use it. Intimate. In-ti-mate.
And that’s incredibly terrifying.
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My cousin skates really well. What I should’ve done was give my skateboard to him but I didn’t think about it when I did it. I remember once sitting down near the pier on lake Michigan watching him attempt to grind down a pole down twenty or so steps. We spent a lot of days that summer with me watching him and talking to Cassie, a girlfriend of mine. He could get up on the pole easy enough but had issues staying on it the entire time. I watched him and it didn’t mean anything to me. It was just my cousin trying to master that pole and that was it. I knew he would do it eventually and he did. I was proud of him, but that was all. Nothing too deep or spectactular. Just another challenge conquered.
My cousin has schizophrenia. He started showing symptoms eight years after that day at lake Michigan. He’s a different person now. You can see it in his body. He’s sunken in when he used to be a healthy man. You can see it in his eyes especially. “Where did you go?” I wonder. The person he was is gone and I don’t understand where he could have gone. He’s somewhere inside that shell and I want to smack him upside the head to get it out of him even though rationally I know it wouldn’t do anything but get him mad. So of course I don’t.
Now when I think of him trying to grind down that pole all I can think, all I can see when I have him in my minds eye is that he was beautiful.
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How do you tell someone you love them when you don’t have any words?
You write, of course. That’s not as oxymoronic as it sounds. If you don’t have the words to say what you want to, you them stick all into a bucket and splash all of them all at once onto a blank page, see what sticks. It might not say what you want it to say, it might not be about them at all. But if they know you, if they truly know you, they’ll know what it really says; “I love you” with every line. It says I love you, I need you, please don’t hurt me, please do not go.
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How do you tell someone you love them when they don’t have any words?
You read to them. It’s much more difficult because you not only have to take all your words, but everyone else’s words and put them in that bucket. You try and try until you find something that sticks. Maybe you never will but you have to keep trying. The words are there, somewhere, you need to find their words for them to remind them what it’s like to be free.
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Somewhere there’s a piano playing chopsticks.
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