PIANO NOTES

PIANO NOTES: A SHORT STORY.

        I will honestly tell you all, this short story incorporating the situational context of our current times was hugely inspired by my love for piano ballads and just the efficacy of the instrument as a whole to convey poignant emotions. Cue BRAND NEW ME by Alicia Keys and any Adele song, particularly SOMEONE LIKE YOU.

Read this and share your thoughts with me regarding my attempt at short fiction. 

***

          
    There was something eerie in the air as a soft cooing sound seemed like an omen; the last birds, it seemed, had let some lone figure record their dying breaths before the world went to sleep or observe hibernation for two years too long.  There were no birds around, just a distant echo building in my mind alone. It was the most unnatural melody, the most evanescent, uncommon bridge to the chorus that kept repeating itself on loop through the ides of a whole generation. THE IDES OF MARCH was now no more than a ghost's incantation. Or just mere words. It was in the iconography of an alienated world order.

In the middle of this silence, I heard no trumpet, even a distant bugle signalling a break from this stillness as my mind had always seen things in musical cues ; an instrumental solo or song fit for any occasion where I found myself introverted for better or worse. Synesthesia, they called it then. It was the most comforting defence mechanism. Today, it's a necessity to imagine the lost music of the seasons underscore the hours.  I don't think I had ever heard the faint tickling of the ivories or seen my city drenched in melancholic notes of the piano in my mind. Ever. It just didn't seem right to think a day would come when I will be lost, truly lost in the middle of a busy intersection jostling with college crowds, the exact same location two kilometers from my house I had learnt by rote over years, practicing the same lines of faces and streaming urban sprawl of humanity over and over again as some kind of image frozen in time, only repeated in cycles in the same trajectory and exact order. That's life as we come to understand when we refuse to let the mundanity of everyday take us over. Not atleast when we are young.

But now I see no young, glowing faces excitedly reaching for the day. Or any demographic or specimen of flesh and blood lock eyes with me or pass on an obligatory glance. Like humans do. As is normal.  Like how strangers do  just to let us know they see us on the same route and have come to expect this without fail. And the piano notes come to me again. No, no, no.  This just isn't the drill. Not like this. I'm here, on an otherwise busy street bustling with words, laughs, spirits and clatter of observations but it's dead. Empty. All in the yesterdays that slowly fade like an old photograph lost to the storm all of a sudden or burnt away in a fit of rage. Or by nature. Now I see how nature took its revenge. So is the piano in the middle of this desolate stretch burning? Or has it been drowned in the river right next to it?

I wish I had taken those lessons more to understand its understated beauty.
I wish I had not cursed at these crowds a little too often because they inconvenienced my bubble of tranquility. I wish I had not said how I longed to see imagery different from the one I had known by rote for twenty plus years. Or that there was too much smoke enveloping its classical beauty.  I cursed at the heat, the warm winds, old friends and acquaintances who had left their innocence and neighbours who had forgotten to open doors or their windows of the heart. The soul was dead, I had proclaimed.  I love my city, it's home but it's dead. It's like a marriage of sights and sounds that had soured with the passage of time and just lived through another day, for the sake of appearances.