The gloomy melody was coming out of the old piano as those long fingers,
almost as pale as the ivory keys, stroke them with bold lust, sometimes slowly,
others energetically.
He played with the same sensuality that he strategically used on skin contact:
careful, light, slow and precise, as opposed to the vigour of those big, strong
hands.
The music score was all scribbled in an attempt to always perfect the
work that would never be finished. Was that really perfectionism, laziness or a
not-so-disguised narcissism?
How sad had the autumn become before a bleak, desolate winter was unexpectedly
announced.
- Will you be back?
- One day.
- When? How?
- You'll know.
- Will I?
- Surely. Why
not?
He tried to grin, but his smile was always so sad. How come he'd never
smiled completely, with his eyes, his mouth, his whole face? Those eyes didn't
even have proper wrinkles. Had he never really smiled? Had he never been truly happy?
That seemed more than a simple 'see
you soon' or 'until one day'…
- Will you be
happy?
- I will.
A strange uneasiness in my heart. I wanted so much to hug that
much-desired body again. I gave in to the internal conflict, which ran between
right and wrong; between will, need, and longing, against what seemed
ridiculous and coherent.
‘Damn the
conflict. Who cares? It's now or never again!’
- Can I give
you a hug?
- Sure.
How sad this hug, this anguish, that moment was... I wished I could hate
him. But I couldn't.
How could someone hate those that were so much loved?
I let myself go free from that embrace. My eyes were moist. It was
always so damn hard to let go.
- Don’t cry.
- No. I won't
cry. I never cry, as you know.
He laughed.
- Yeah, right.
He looked at me for the last time with that sad, distant look; almost
indecipherable; almost insurmountable and that was all about his decision to
leave, so abruptly.
And then we parted and he departed. All those parts and pieces were all
partly broken and parted, when he departed like he did. I felt like all parts
of my soul were shattered and scattered around me.
Only his song was left. Out of time. Out of tune and out of rhythm. Just like
my heart…
The many notes were all left loose all over the aged and ripped-up music
score so worn out by the use of those long pale fingers, which were tired of
rewriting them, over and over, so many times and without being able to finish
the piece, for once and for all.
There were also those words, handwritten one after the other, without
metric and without rhymes in an impulsive and poor construction. A mixture of vowels
and consonants, arranged to make some sense, on the yellowed paper sheets and
fading, in time… in the eyes of memory…
A nostalgic, downhearted and unfinished Nocturne, left untouched on the
old and now muted piano, at a strategic point in the living room.
That melancholic music still seemed to fully flood the empty spaces.
The emptiness, as a consequence, was overflowing all those blank spaces,
once so full of life in my body and soul.
In my life there was only the glum, unfinished melody, still vibrating
in the corners of the ambience and memory, like that pseudo-relationship, which
had been suspended in an 'until now'
expectation… infinitely…
***
