Dear Smythe,
The madness lingers…or is it the truth of it?
There is so much to get past when you practice a long-forgotten song: struggling to pick out the notes (did you ever really learn how to read music?) once you’ve realized how much your memory has failed, repeating the same mistakes while you wonder if you’ll ever hear that melody, properly I mean, getting better, getting worse again, the cycle repeats over and over with some steady and slow (very slow) improvement. You play, and you play, and you play, and you think, well it isn’t too bad, but it won’t get much better. But you keep on, because what else can you do?
And suddenly you find yourself lost. The music is emerging from somewhere in between your fingers and the keys, and you aren’t thinking about how to do it, you are encompassed by the fervor, it drowns you, you don’t know where you are, it is raw and it is pure. And when it is over, you play it again, and again, and again. There are tears in your eyes.
Later, when your fingers have stopped moving, you are still dizzy with it. The tumult rolls over you, the heartbreak, loss, anger, grief, and most importantly, the love. You sit at the kitchen table and you cannot comprehend anything else but what has disturbed you. You feel that nothing will ever be the same.
You wonder if you will love anyone as madly, as deeply, as he did her. You don’t know, but there is one way, and one way only, to find out. You find yourself again sitting on the hard black bench, the piano in front of you, and you play. You play it over and over. This is all that matters.
Love,
Marguerite
