Echoes of a piano

I hadn't heard the theme from The Piano for a long time. I'd even forgotten to put it under "Favourite Music" in my Friendster profile. It's been an even longer time since I stopped to think about what it used to mean to me, the effect it used to have on me.

I'd loved it from the moment I heard it when I watched the Jane Campion movie, but wasn't a profound part of me yet at the time. It took a lonely piano and the soft voice of the first man-boy I fell in love with.

It wasn't my fingers moving over the keys, nor the rousing music that they conjured. It wasn't the warmth of the afternoon nor the unique smell of someone else's home, the kind that you never find in another. It wasnt the feel of the cool tiles under my left foot nor the brass pedal under my right, nor the little ornaments and photo frames that lined the top of the piano which fleetingly crossed my gaze.

It was the feel of his gaze on my back, the electric awareness of his presence a few feet behind me. His gaze was almost a physical sensation, a gentle warmth on the back of my head, following the length of my hair, flowing over my shoulders and down to the small of my back and the back of my arms.

"The Heart Asks Pleasure First" is its name. Its music was pure, flowing torrents of passion that filled you and lifted you, creating such longing that you felt like your heart would break. And when it was your hands that made such music, you could feel its power through your fingers and your arms as you raced through its depths, its crests and its rip tides.

I played it on the day I found love, on the piano that sat in the house of the man-boy. That night, he whispered that his piano still lay uncovered and that he watched it, remembering the day, remembering my fingers on it.

From then, whenever I heard it, I thought of him and his voice. Whenever I heard his voice or was with him, I heard it in my head. Memories of lying next to him watching him sleep, the music playing softly on the hi-fi, washing over me in those moments of timeless perfection.

That love is long gone, so completely that it no longer so much as tugs when I think about it. When the music plays, it is not the man-boy that I remember. It is not the strains of a once perfect love that dominated my life so completely and destructively that fills my mind. It is the image of a time gone by, of a part of me that lives but has metamorphosised, of the power of the music that holds sway over my mind and my soul as I let myself drown in its depths and mourn as its last notes trail to its end.