Vignettes of a Pianist by Megan Yim

Author:Megan Yim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Golden Brick Road Publishing House
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

XXVII

watching

As the next performer walks up on stage, you can’t help but feel a sense of gratitude and relief that it won’t be you who is performing today. Today, you are just a spectator. Today, you are a part of the audience, looking from the outside in.

He takes a bow with one hand on the side of the grand and the other across his stomach. The audience claps as he takes a seat on the bench. His posture is almost flawless and his right foot slides over to the damper pedal. Prepared. His hands and fingers find their home bases on the keys and he takes a deep breath. Someone in the audience coughs. You take another look at the recital programme to double check what he’s playing: a Chopin etude you’re not familiar with.

He takes a deep breath and begins. His fingers flourish across the keys and they flutter like dragonflies zipping through tall blades of grass. A piece of his effortlessly gelled hair falls down and hits the front of his forehead. His eyes close at one of the sections and you, too, feel submerged in the music. Your eyes drift away from the sight of him and down to your lap. Though he is no longer in sight, the music continues.

Still looking down you suddenly hear him stop. Silence and another cough. You look up to check what’s happened, and it appears to be the worst of all: he’s blanked out. A memory slip and he is defeated. You can’t help but want to run up the stage, give him a hug and tell him it’s all going to be okay. In those three seconds your heart shakes as you remember the feelings of fear, regret, sorrow, anger, impatience, and defeat wrapping you up like a cocoon, so that the dragonflies your fingers were before have now vanished and have been swallowed up whole.

Instead, you keep your head down because by staring, you’re useless. You look back down at the programme and for the sake of having nothing better to do, reread his name and the piece title. He then resumes playing just as if he broke out of the cocoon’s finest thread. Thin and subtle, you could never really see the cocoon of fear and regret, but you would always feel it. Broken. Broken lay the remains of the cocoon, shattered into pieces, lying now on the floor of the stage while he continues to play on. Somehow and somewhere in his mind he had found his way back on the page in his mind. You wonder if it were perhaps a simple memory slip or just a brief trip of a note that snowballed into something unavoidably embarrassing. You wonder which part of him he feels the most: Was it regret? Shame? Fear? Was it the embarrassment of having to face his teacher after, or his dad who would look sternly at him? Was he regretting not practicing as consistently? No. He had probably played

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