Tickling The Ivories

I recently bought myself a piano keyboard with some Christmas money.

I hadn't touched a piano in years -- not since I left Saskatchewan in 2019. I had taken piano lessons in both the first and last years of my degree, but since I had come into the program essentially without an instrument and since the program director was an opera singer, I had by default become a voice major. The worst and most detested voice major in the program, mind you, but a voice major nonetheless.

What I had really wanted to learn was piano. But I didn't advocate for myself -- I felt embarrassed that I couldn't even read music and here I wanted to be in the music program. At least in voice you could fake it without reading music. You should be better than this was the thought that constantly dogged everything I did -- dance, voice, piano, anything.

I took eight years' worth of music theory in the space of two. I learned enough piano to play my own melody lines in practice and to sight read new choir pieces. The rare time I attempted to play something on the piano in its own right, I noticed the peace that settled over my soul as I watched my fingers work out a recognisable -- and not unpleasant -- tune. But then the voices of everybody I knew would come back in my brain, shrieking and strident: you should be better than this.

When I left Saskatchewan in 2019, I was so tired of hearing that voice that I abandoned singing entirely. I celebrated my final day in the practice room, before my last show there. I would never have to set foot in those rooms again. I would never have anybody give me a failing grade on the voice God gave me ever again.

My piano skills died with it. Due to the absolutely insane schedule that school demands performance (read: voice) majors keep, the only time I really got to play piano was when I was learning a new song for my voice lessons. With my voice lessons firmly and definitely behind me, I also no longer played piano.

For a while, I forgot that I had ever known how to play. The pandemic came and took all the theatre opportunities away, so I lost my ability to sight-read music as well. I remembered the hellish hours of voice training during college, but the fleeting seconds of piano were lost.

This past Christmas, my husband offered to buy me a piano keyboard and showed me the one he had in mind. It looked great, but it was more money than I knew he could afford to spend on me and talked him out of it. But then a relative of his gave us both a not-insubstantial amount of money. Despite my pleas to put mine in our savings account for a house, my husband insisted his relative would have wanted us to spend it on something fun.

I have never in my life possessed a sum of money more than $20 with no option to spend it on the practical things of life. I sat on that money for literal months as I tried to think of something 'fun' to buy. I thought of a bass guitar -- something I had wanted to learn for years. But reading reviews on beginner basses overwhelmed me, and I wondered if I was really going to have the energy to learn a new instrument with my few remaining scraps of energy at the end of each day.

But then I remembered the piano keyboard my husband had shown me months earlier. I had some piano experience. I wouldn't be learning a whole new instrument from scratch. And I knew my husband would approve since it had been his idea in the first place.

So I ordered it, it arrived, and my mother and sister (an advanced pianist) sent me some sheet music my sister was no longer using. I found a copy of Michael W. Smith's Great Is The Lord is the pages they sent, and while that's not my favourite worship song or even my favourite MWS song, the memories of listening to it on my dad's vinyl copy drove me to pick that one.

The first week was mostly a rude awakening of just how much music theory I had forgotten. I spent days just trying to remember how key signatures worked (my theory books were all at my parents' house), and it took about as long to remember the notes of the bass clef (the treble clef was more hardwired into my soprano brain, but even that had taken a hit). But it began to come back to me, and I even began to develop some smoothness, then to play both hands together through some parts of the song.

And every time I sat down at that keyboard to run through the song, I felt a brush of... peace? maybe even joy? tickle my shoulders. It was so soft that I didn't even notice it at first. But after a few weeks, I realised it was the same feeling I get when I dance. That same peace, that calm, that assurance that all is right with the world, if only for a moment. And I began to remember having that same feeling the few times I played piano in its own right at college. Practicing voice had only ever been a source of stress and fear and frustration. Playing piano had been so lovely and calming that I had avoided it because it was 'wasting my time...' if I wasn't in a state of maximum stress while doing it, it probably was because I was using it to procrastinate on doing something useful... right?

But now, nobody is grading me on my voice or my piano skills, so I'm continuing to practice piano and relish the peace it brings me. I still don't have a space to dance in (and at the moment, I also do not have a healthy back to dance with), but at least I have this, this one modicum of peace in a world that feels increasingly and heavily against me. I'm only sad that it took me this long to realise that piano is what I should have been pursuing all along.

Rewrite Update

I'm currently rewriting the MC's death scene.

It's a weird experience. I first wrote this novel, this scene, in November 2014. Even then, I was no stranger to writing death scenes, but that's not what's weird.

What's weird is all the losses, the deaths that happened to me in real life -- all happened after I wrote that rough draft. This character dies of asthma. I wrote this scene in November and lost my best friend to lung failure three months later. My cousin died of asthma five months after I first wrote this scene. I didn't even know she had asthma until the night she died.

It's also weird that this doesn't really trigger me or raise my anxiety levels (I don't have an anxiety disorder -- one of the few mental illnesses I've managed to dodge so far. My fear levels are normal, but my sadness and self-hatred levels are off the charts). Maybe I've accepted defeat and am just assuming bad things will always happen no matter what and there are absolutely zero ways to get out of it. Maybe I've been successful as separating fact from fiction. Maybe not really remembering writing the initial scenes in the first place is helping me be more objective -- there's not much emotional connection as far as 'I wrote this scene on this day while sitting in this place at this time of day' so I haven't had the 'I wrote this and then it happened' thought. Maybe the writing and the real life happened far enough apart that I was able to keep them separate.

Maybe I just knew that this is what had to happen for this book to work, and I have to do what I have to do. This book has no point if she survives. She's already had a near-death experience and the character's lives just continued on for the most part (as it does at college -- if you're not actively dead, you aren't sick enough. At least not at my college). For the MMC to learn what he needs to learn, he has to lose her. And it has to be severe and sudden, with absolutely no recourse. She's not the type of person to willy-nilly end a friendship, especially not one as precious as what they have.

Honestly, her leaving this particular friend character was the initial seed of the idea. At first the scene in my head was her driving away, never to return, but somewhere between initial idea and NaNoWriMo that year it morphed into what it is now, and I think that's a much stronger climax with more interesting repercussions. If she doesn't die, he never gets mad enough to stand up to the villain character -- at the cost of everything he's worked for. If she doesn't die, he never learns to live, really live, and to value people and experiences over money and 'proving people wrong.'

I guess this novel is kind of a synthesis of what was going in my own life at the time -- I was still very much dealing with implications of my own near-death experience several years before and I was in the beginning stages of learning those very same lessons. The main character was who I was striving to become, and the MMC was me in that moment, trying to figure out how to get from here to there.

In some ways I think I've regressed in my goals there. And that's what making this rewrite in general so hard -- because I shut down hard when my cousin died. Suddenly life was not beautiful and life was not worth living. I never fully had the chance to learn those lessons. They have never taken root in my own life. And because this character doesn't die until very near the end of book, that means I spend 97% of the book building her up into this Mary Poppins sort of magical figure (while somehow not being a Mary Sue) with which I am very unfamiliar, and only the final 3% of the book is MMC consciously learning the lessons (which I actually am familiar with). Since the novel is 'written' by him after her death, there are elements of him picking up threads that he missed while he was living them... but that's a tough line to toe, though, because I very much want a 'no spoilers' approach. He, our narrator, doesn't mention that she dies until she does, right in front of him, barely a year after he meets her.

I do intend to send this draft out to a couple of beta readers, though I can think of a couple of things I might need to rewrite after this. This time I did a straight-through, top to bottom rewrite with absolutely no jumping around (partly so I wouldn't forget to write 'smaller' scenes, partly so I wouldn't have to completely reassemble the book potentially multiple times only to find parts still missing -- in short, to stave off mind-melting, brain-burning overwhelm). I started in April 2022 and I am on pace to finish this month. I'm currently at 77,000 words. I've never written anything this long before (you'd better believe I'm backing this thing up on an external drive every other day).

I'm just so proud that I've gotten this far. Even if nobody pays money for this book, I'm proud that I have given it a fair shot at life.