So there I was with my own solo entrance. My hands skimmed the polished wood of the sole ornament in the dimly lit room. It was a grand piano, that creaked with age if you banged any louder than a forte. I had bought it cheaply at an elementary school music room’s annual garage sale. Stickers decorated the dusty surface of the piano lid, and the keys themselves were sticky from the hands of kids who had improperly washed their hands after lunch, if not at all.
And yet, I placed my hands on those weary, half dead keys, to play. To play as if I could create a world with my flying fingers. And I did. Mist flew into the room and started swirling into the shape of a sphere. My fingers went even faster, striking the keyboard in an almost gliding fashion, travelling up and down, right to left. Quickly, quickly, the world changed. Lighter and lighter the world grew, where a new word was introduced! Friends! Such a nice word! There was hope that was triggered by that one word. Friends. My fingers slipped and struck the wrong chord! The world came crashing down, like a video being rewound. I clutched for the remote to fast forward it again, but the mist slipped out of the piano room and I was left there lonely again.
The piano room had no doors. It had no windows. It was a suffocating prison of a room with the gloomy piano its only companion. A candle rested atop the piano, with its light flickering on and off for eternity. Sometimes, I wished that it would burn the piano, burn the room, so that I could be free from the chamber that you would call depression. But, of course, the laws of the world would not bend to meet my needs.
I was a lonely child; lonely ever since I had been born. Nothing seemed to penetrate the thick walls of my shielded heart. The piano had been the only piercing light that had come through those shadows in my body. Of course, I had the potential to let everyone else in, but it was ‘fitting in’ that isolated me from ‘everybody else.’ Who was everybody else? What in the world was fitting in? I just didn’t know.
We all know that at this time, fitting in is the prime thing to worry about. I never seemed to fit the criteria for the type of person that people wanted. Maybe I was too hard to get, maybe I just didn’t seem to care about my new friends enough to matter, but I was left alone every single day because I slipped up and spread the wrong rumor, said the wrong thing, did the wrong deed.
And so I sat there, day after day, playing that same song, building the same world, only to watch it end as quickly as it had started. Hoping that one day, someone, anyone, would go ahead and reach for my hands to pull me out of that damned piano room.
I could see hands, of course, reaching to pop that internal bubble of mine, but they never took that final step to find that one key that could unlock my heart. There were my parents, the psychotherapist, depression manager, and so many others that desperately clawed in hope that I would reach my own hands out. But, you see, I’m not one of those happy go lucky children that can smile and willingly take a hand. I am more like the one who slaps your hand harshly away.
Come winter, my thoughts grew cold and dark, just like it morphed outside. They froze in such a way that without some type of flamethrower, no one could be accepted into my reality. But then someone interrupted that silent, dark, lonely room with a burst. With a mane of fire red hair, he tore through the veils of my heart. With a lopsided grin, and a funky one at that, he pushed my hands away from the piano to play his own piece. And then. The one thing that I had wished for every single Christmas of my life came true. It wasn’t just friendship. The candle lit an ember of fire to that stone hearted piano with a single word. Love.