sean

Vision blurred with the tears filling his eyes, fingertips dancing across the keys, he played with a focus and intensity he had forgotten he could muster. His hands were like machines, the muscles of his fingers recalling and repeating the sequence of movements they'd played so many times before. Beads of sweat began to form on his forehead but the erratic and violent shaking of his head as he played tossed the moisture off prematurely, misting the air around him leaving tiny rainbows in the wake of his head's path.

This was who he was and these moments were when he was alive. That other person, the one who checked the mail, the one who ordered chinese food to be eaten alone in front of the television set, the one who reluctantly shoved his dirty laundry into the machines in the basement, wasn't him. That person may have lived in his body, may have paid his rent or filed his taxes, but that person wasn't who he was because he was only his fingers as they moved across the keys. That movement was the essence of who he was and the other guy it seemed was doing everything he could to kill him.

Not that he was thinking any of this as he played. Thought was exactly what he was trying to avoid in the first place. He relegated his consciousness to his fingertips, to the muscles in his hands and neck. His mind was a blank, a trick he had learned as a hyperactive child during piano lessons, the only way his hands could focus on the task assigned to them. A trick that took him nearly two decades to master, much longer than it took him to learn to play the instrument the trick was suppose to aid him in learning to play.

So he played and he filled the silence of the room with himself and created the silence in his head he needed so badly and had almost forgotten he could create.