Nothing makes me feel deeper than modern piano.
When I'm home alone, I listen to the piano. I never learned to play myself, but there's a beautiful madness to the piano. As the keys press, black white, black white, they create a slowly unfolding and then all-consuming crescendo that makes me feel as if it's all alright. Even the loss and heartbreak. The rise and then the fall. The crashing of it all.
There's beauty to that too. There's beauty in the grief.
The slicing-edge of loss.
The way it grips one's heart with an all-consuming hold. It pulls and hurts for years. And yet, while one is experiencing such pain, there are moments of laughter and joy.
That's when, in the grieving, you realize that joy and grief can co-exist like two opposites.
What is a storyline without the loss? What is a story without its challenges? There is nothing to overcome.
If you take grief, the kind where you say, "no, but I cannot handle this, I have been through bad before, but you don't even know, this time, it has done me in."
That is it. That is the space. We are only on this earth once; can you imagine not experiencing such love to have experienced such great pain in the loss? Where you aren't sure anymore of God or religion.
Or love or if it even exists.
You experience depression. You experience The Dark Night of the Soul. You experience days and nights and days and nights where you don't even want to be alive or feel or be anywhere because what it feels like is you're just continually falling.
But you still smile.
You still see people on the street and smile back at them. You still go to the grocery store and try to act polite. You try to talk to others. You try to hide your pain. Because you figure nobody else is experiencing such a thing. It's such an isolating experience to be sucked down into such deep grief, but, oh, when you rise, my love, they won't understand that space either. It's the law. The fall comes before the rise. There will always be the rise.
It may not come right away, but it will arrive.
In the past few years, I have been hit time and time again with loss of love, loss of friends, and loss of a past life. Loss of family. Loss of belonging. And yet, when I run along the beach during that melting magenta sunset alongside the ocean's lapping tide, feet feeling light atop the wet earth, and wisps of clouds above me, TJ's zip-up hanging off my shoulders and my sun-soaked curls dancing along their edges, I know.
I still know.
The rise isn't here yet, but it's coming. I feel it coming like the way a piano concerto builds and builds, black white, black white, hand playing wildly over hand, until you arrive at the space you knew you'd get to, where it all flows so easily and simply, and the chaos doesn't leave, but the freedom is found right there in all.
Play: Talk is Cheap on Spotify
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