I didn’t find you. I guess you could say we found each other. Neither of us was special, which made us perfectly matched. You were wood and strings, I was flesh and bones, and our bodies together produced a different kind of sound, like a craftsman’s workshop at full speed.
Sometimes we disturbed the neighbours, but that was mostly me. I was too loud. It was liberating, though, to follow the principle of pleasure long before I knew what pleasure was supposed to mean. It was liberating to let my hands roam free and grant my lungs license to scream at the top of.
Before you, I knew little of what I wanted to say, mostly because I had no way of saying it. I was all metal and no steam. It was you who set me in motion, tied my abc's together into strings of theories stretching through space. It wasn’t eloquence that we achieved, it was merely speech, but speech is everything to those on mute.
You taught me left from right. My hands now moved in opposite directions. Now here, now there, now able to pick and choose, to press down, to let go, this manual for life at my fingertips with careful instructions I never really mastered through no fault of your own. Letting go. That one I’m still working on.
Most of all you taught me to play, to laugh in the face of boredom, to never be alone because alone was the place I came to be with you. We had our secrets, our love affairs, we passed notes that I scribbled endlessly and you read musically, in that nylon language of yours that left amaranthine marks on my fingers.
I played you everywhere, and once, in bed, I fell asleep right beneath you, your long neck pointing past my slumbering eyes, to the clouds where I was dreaming. And there we are, in that photograph someone took of me dreaming and you pointing, the past looking to the future from which I now look back on us.
Our relationship has changed. No strings attached, you say from the top of the bookcase where your naked body rests at present, because I can’t seem to let go, even though there’s been others since. Love doesn’t always fare well in the game of time.
But the other day, at the shop, the long-haired Brazilian guy with a nice smile quoted me a price for patching you up, making you good as new, or halfway there at least. And it didn’t matter that your wood is cracked and your head bald, it didn’t matter that my hands no longer move like they used to, that it hurts to press down. I loved you then as I’ve ever loved you, so I said I’ll come back soon, and I will.
