Blackvspurple

There’s something special about the piano. The way its keys are either black or white, as if everything in life can be just black or white, that life has no grey areas – areas where the impossible meets. That’s how the piano looks like – straight, strict, with a whole set of rules and regulations that one must follow.

But along comes this boy, so simple, so young and so full of hope. He doesn’t see the world like how a piano looks. He just knows how to play from the heart. And so he does exactly that – he sits and starts playing and that’s when the piano changes from something so simple to something so complicated.

His tunes spin tales of is sadness and his pain. Like the piano, from the outside he seems simple, no worries, but if there was anyone who bothered to look deep into his heart, they would see what the piano could see – pain and longing.

And so in order to be understood, he just pours everything he has into the piano. When he starts playing, no one thinks that the piano was just about being black and white. Just as important as the piano was to him, he was equally as important to the piano.

But as people started to grow to love the boy, he decided that the piano wasn’t enough to show the world his pain and so he called for the drums.

The drums were thrilled at having such an opportunity. It accompanied the piano’s sad tunes very well. One so sad and miserable while the other so happy and upbeat. This was better for the boy as the began to gain popularity. He wasn’t just a boy anymore. To the world, he was finally somebody.

He decided that he should now ask the string family to join him. Thus the bass guitar added more sadness. The two guitars added on to the happiness, causing the boy even more popularity.

Girls wanted to date him. Other boys wanted to be him, but none of them knew him back then, back then when he was a nobody and not a somebody. The boy now wasn’t just the boy and the piano. He was the boy and the band.

One would think that having a band would get to the boy. One would think that the boy would be tempted by everything that the world now wants to offer to the boy. But no matter what the temptations were, no matter what the rest of the world tried to offer him, his answers were always no.

Sure, now he could just abandon the piano if he wanted. Sure, now just the other instruments were enough to give him everything that money could buy. Sure, he could get any girl he wanted. Sure, he could buy many other unique instruments that the world would choose over the piano.

But.

The core of his being could never be changed. Who he was inside, no one else knew. Sure the drums tried to understand, so did the bass guitar, so did the other two electric guitars. Their attempts were fruitless. He had only one thing – the piano.

The piano who was always there when he needed it the most. The piano who gave him an alternative to the endless pain he felt. Only the piano gave him life – made him a somebody. And so when the time came for him to inspire more people, he could only think of the piano. Nothing else mattered.

The boy went on the stage and there she was – his first love, his wonderful black and white piano. He sat on her bench and touched her keys and suddenly the hundreds of people who were there to be inspired were oblivious to him.

At the end of the day, even with all the money and fame, the only thing that mattered was for the boy to be understood. At the end of the day when the boy achieved everything that the mainstream world could enjoy, he only wanted to share it all with the piano, his one true friend and love.

(Written while listening to piano tunes from Snow Patrol songs, while sitting in the balcony of my cosy resort room of KTM Resort Batam, while staring at the moon, while thinking of my only one, while pondering the latest chapter I read of The Girl at the Lion D’or by Sebastian Faulks.)

This entry was posted on May 4, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under Short Stories . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.