Coffee and Debussy

My Sunday afternoon

I’m having a wonderful Sunday afternoon, listening to Debussy’s Clair de Lune on repeat and crudely trying follow along on my out of tune piano, my fingers feeling their way around the keys like someone stumbling their way around a dark, unfamiliar room. I think about my mother every time I touch the black keys on a piano and how I’ve always liked how they sounded. How she wanted for me to learn this instrument so badly, to play music like this, and how I disappointed her because I was a mixture of clumsy fingers and childish impatience. I’m drinking a coffee I made with half and half and coconut sugar, and for no discernible reason, I’m crying my eyes out. If you were here and asked me why, I’m not sure I could articulate it in a compact, coherent way. I’d probably just blabber something about the universe, the unfairness of it all, the fleeting nature of our consciousness, the mystery and nature of time… and you’d tell me to chill out, maybe have a cigarette. I might take you up on it and stare at the tree in my backyard, amazed at all the leaves.

But it’s not sadness. I’m not sad at all.

There are just days when both doors open wide and the cross draft that hits reminds me that for whatever it means, here I am, standing in the ever-present Now. And in that brief moment, things just are, without discernment or judgement. But that moment of centeredness is so easy to lose. Thoughts always wander to the past or the future, and with it, hopes and fears flutter in like little moths, and eventually one of the doors slam. I’m back in my little house and my little life, and there was something I needed to do, wasn’t there…

Maybe it’s the first 60 seconds of Clair de Lune, but when I close my eyes and listen to these notes, written by someone whose body is now in a dark box somewhere, echoing through my house like it echoed through his over a hundred years ago, I just totally lose it. I wonder about his life, little moments he had that no one was there to witness. You never look into a mirror without being aware of your own presence before it I suppose. I know that thinking about Debussy is just self-reflexive entertainment, thinking about myself, my place in this world, in this moment in the long stretch of time that is infinity, and for all of time are we just a note in a song that echoes on in different manifestations? A loop so long that we can’t perceive it as such.

My aunt borrowed my car once, and when she returned it, she had filled the gas, washed it, and detailed it. I said she needn’t have done that, and for such a short trip after all. She replied that we should always return things in a better state than when we received them. I try to apply that lesson in my life and hope that the math works out in the end.

I hit a careless note on the piano and listen hard as it fades.

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