What If

Dear Alex,

Before dawn and work yesterday, in between dream and duty at the spring of an Autumn Tuesday, I did the most effortless thing I’ve never done before: turn on music. What had been sweat-proof and fool proof in planning was overturned in irony for me.

I bought the stereo shortly before the COVID pandemic, prematurely planning for an easy season of tango and day trips, thrice tempted to scowl at self for the fourth year of missing my new electric Yamaha piano that I’d donated in absurdity.

On speaker I listened to a sonata by Mozart, on piano a piece I’d rehearsed for a year to bow to my examiner at the Royal Conservatory of Music three decades lapsed. In the curl of a note, you could still skid through scales and tease on chords with Lang Lang now, deaf to the metronome and rubric of worry.

For a slash of a second then, I thought I heard something soundless from the keyboard, a dash between dimples, tree stumps alive in paired feeding with shoots green as day. What if I could go back in sheets to play again all over on black-and-white keys to relearn the awe of a song, a garden, our wilderness?

Yours, 

Kate