Episode 3 — Twinkle Twinkle

I’m not good at hoping. You want something, you get your hopes up. If it comes true, it’s just what you expected — nothing to celebrate. If it doesn’t, you’ve only yourself to blame for the disappointment. I hate that foolish rising and falling. I wouldn’t wish on a shooting star even if one crossed right in front of me.

And yet, right now, I’ve thrown all of that aside, and I’m hoping anyway. I’m praying she’ll be there — in the old building at the end of the covered walkway, in the music room. My heart is skipping and creaking, embarrassingly loud. It’s been a long time since it beat like this. I think the last time was when I saw a piano recital on television as a small child, and felt something I couldn’t name.

The longing and hope I felt then never came to anything. But I want to believe it was all foreshadowing — foreshadowing for exactly this moment. I make fun of myself for thinking in such thoroughly novel-addled terms — and then, tracing the shape of that feeling, following the line of that still-pounding heart, I open the door to the music room.

In an instant, everything — the hoping, the fear of disappointment, that absurdly noisy heartbeat — all of it was blown away. The sight before me, the beauty of her, painted over everything else.

She’s only sitting at the piano. Only showing me her profile, with a languid, pensive expression. That alone is enough to set off a sensation like being tickled in the deepest, most essential part of my brain. How can someone who’s nearly a stranger take this much of me away with her? I try to think about it, but my thoughts are in her hands. As if to demonstrate that — as if baring everything about her own beauty to answer me — she turned her gaze slowly toward me.

Then she cast her eyes down, looking up through her lashes, and a faint flush of rose crept across her pale porcelain cheek, and she offered me her silence.

I marked that silence, gently, with a question.

“I thought you might not be here.”

A roundabout way of bringing into relief the simple fact: she was here. I despair at my own smallness, my own convoluted pettiness. Standing before her beauty, that smallness only looks smaller.

“I’m here.”

She answers with the minimum possible words.

“You didn’t quit piano.”

She fell quiet, as if turning the question over, and then:

“I quit quitting. There was no longer a reason to quit.”

A riddle of an answer. I felt myself drawn in, recklessly, by the enigma of this beautiful girl. In front of her, all the appearances and pride I’d so carefully maintained stopped meaning anything — and the strangest part was that their meaninglessness didn’t bother me at all.

“I see. Will you play for me again today?”

Another pause. Even the silence felt like it was adding depth to everything that would come after — every word, every sound of her voice.

I let myself sink into it.

She shifted slightly on the black piano bench and said:

“Want to play together today?”

She patted the empty space beside her, beckoning.

The gesture was welcoming and yet held something inside it too — a flicker of wariness, of uncertainty, of something probing and hesitant. Fitting neatly into that contradiction, I — shallow creature that I am — sat down.

“I can’t play piano, though…”
“That’s fine.”

Without warning, something cool touched my hand. The instant I understood it was her skin, warmth flooded through me — and as if in counterpoint to that warmth, a plain, simple melody was guided out by her.

My hand taken in hers, I followed her movements, let my fingers be pressed down into the keys. Notes released from fingertips laid over hers.

A melody I recognised. Achingly familiar.

“You can play this one, can’t you?”

On the music stand sat a dog-eared, battered score, and I could make out a title I knew, written in childlike lettering. Hearing that familiar sound, my own clumsy melody — I felt something stirring, some old longing recalled from somewhere.

I traced the shape of that longing, following the fingering, desperately trying to make the notes. And as if gently drawing alongside that longing — a smooth, flowing stream of sound came pouring into my ears.

Wrapping my single notes up and turning them into something beautiful. At the edge of my vision, pale slender fingers were moving brilliantly across the keys.

I knew I mustn’t look at her directly. The moment her whole face came into my sight, my fingers would stop. I would be dyed through with her, helplessly and entirely.

And I thought: that would be all right too — to be that puppet of her beauty. And at the same moment: I don’t want it to stop. Both truths at once, irreconcilable.

I moved my fingers as hard as I could. She moved lightly, easily, even humming along, guiding me through the music. Her piano, her humming, softly stroking my ears.

Music is joyful. Playing alongside her makes me happy. Normally, no matter how I wrestle words into position, satisfaction is almost never what I find. And yet this simple feeling is doing something terrible to my heart, something I can’t help. Enough to make me wish it would go on forever. Enough to make me hope for something I know can’t last.

My chest was full of that helplessness and that joy together. And I only know one way to disguise a thing I can’t help. Ungainly as it is, I reach for words.

I load a wish into a song. I put a prayer into music.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star—”

My voice and her humming became entangled. Sound and sound dissolved into each other, became one. These fingers moving so uncertainly apart were weaving a single thing together. Marking the same time.

I thought:

If only I could cut out this blinking, instant moment and keep it safe somewhere.

But that isn’t possible. There is no such thing as forever. A final note will come, inevitably. So — at least —

What I’m feeling now. This skipping heartbeat. Her existence, filling everything outside my field of vision. Every piece of it — I want to scoop it up in words, seal it inside them. That’s why. For that. To build a forever that has no right to exist.

For that, I wanted desperately to write.