vertical raze i've played other_people's_pianos before. lots of them. but margaret and matt's piano was the best of them all. it wasn't anything special to look at. it was some battered old brown upright with a german or russian name i'd never heard before. the lid was never open. i never saw its heart. but i felt it vibrate through old spruce, felt it rattle my chest, and the sound it made filled the house and shook something loose inside of me. katie would always gravitate toward the black keys. i don't think she ever finished a song. she had all these little pieces of things she would cycle through, and that was it. but they were perfect pieces. she was always leaning toward e-flat. i didn't favour any specific key. i let myself wander. one of my favourite songs i ever wrote was born on that piano. i was too tired to think and missing someone who was never mine to miss. the sadness coloured the broken melodies and second inversions and made them seem more resonant. richer somehow. i wrote the words the next day. the people who owned the piano became a second family to me. margaret would make me tea just because she knew i loved the smell of it. matt always had great stories to tell. bernie would show up and talk about baking giant bricks of bread. and if i ever knew someone whose whole life was a poem they were writing with their eyes, it was katie. she moved away for school, her parents split up, and all of that went away. i had a dream i was carrying her like a sleeping child, only she wasn't asleep. she hugged herself against my chest. i walked past houses that weren't mine. houses i couldn't enter. she looked happy. her feet stopped right around my shins. she was so light. so easy to hold. i didn't want to let her go. i wanted to protect her. but you can't protect anyone. not even yourself. 210825 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I love piano stories! Also, when I saw "vertical" I thought "vertical transport" - it's how companies talk about elevators and escalators in the world of The Intuitionist. 210825 ... kerry mmmm i didn't realize until now that i love piano stories too. 210826 ... raze y'all are both the sweetest humans. :) 210826 what's it to you? who go blather from