and No Return

Finally the airwaves aligned and we saw each other on the computer screens, I heard the few words that had returned to her voice, pieced together the stories while one of the babies fell asleep on her arm. How impossibly long it seems since that Sunday in May when we stood by your hospital bed and thought we might lose you; how difficult it was to remember a moment before.

You said you can't sing anymore. There is no pitch left. You haven't tried your fingers on a piano, but I should; maybe something you once knew well will still linger in them, if you did. You had such a beautiful voice. We spent so many hours around that piano, and I don't know who I'd be without that.

I saw a concert with Regina, she was in London, I saw her warm up against that piano and it was hard to hear where her body began, where the ivory ended. I remembered hours, days spent by the piano when I had one, my entire wretched youth wrapped around that wooden box, released through a tapestry of notes, of songs, of music. I would not have survived my youth without it. It amazes me I survive adulthood.

If your voice can be taken from you, the music ripped from your fingertips, do you not owe it to yourself to play like hell while you can? Do not I? I resolve to unearth my piano again, to raise my voice. Perhaps I feel I owe it, to you.