Three Dont Tango 18

It is half past nine in the evening. I have finished building for the day. I am tired, but I need something else. I am a musician. How can I keep living day after day without playing my beautiful piano? How can I survive without something soothing to the soul?
I stand before the piano. I open the lid and look at the keys. My hands are sore and rough. There is a faint itching in the fingers. I want to sit down and play. My hands make involuntary motions. There are so many things I want to say. I cannot speak those things. I can only make approximations of their sounds if I sit down and play. I switch off the light. Only the flicker from the fire plays upon the keys now. The fire is busy saying something. I can almost feel the connexions but it is the firelight which is connected. I am just a voyeur. I need the connexion myself.
I sit on the piano stool. I feel I am in an interlude instead of in the real thing. It's the building that ought to be the interlude, not the music.
I play G with the sustain pedal down, and listen to the sound gradually melting away into the darkness. I play the chord of G major. I change to G minor. I play A, then C minor.
I open a book of Preludes by Chopin. I begin the slow opus 28, number 20. I play slower and slower, listening to the sounds. I almost stop playing. I am repeating one note I like.
There is a Nocturne I like as well. I start to play the chords of the middle section. There is a Study with a repeated G. I stop playing. Isn't there a Credence Clearwater Revival song that does that? There is this crashing guitar note every other bar. One can get obsessive with obsessive things. That crashing recurrence is trying to say something. The repeated sound keeps digging into one and saying "Don't you get it? Listen, there it is again".
I stop, and run my fingers vaguely over the keys and start improvising. I need to find myself again. I have been smothered by this wretched building. I need to rediscover the person I used to be before I had to get involved in this nonsense.
Unfortunately, we do have to have somewhere to live. What we really need is a home. We need more than one bedroom. We need a proper bathroom. We need to keep the wind and rain out, and stay warm. I must keep building until we have a proper home.
I start to play a Nocturne by Field, and before long I am dreaming. I am playing a piano in some drawing room in a palace in St Petersburg. Perhaps I should go to bed, sleep, get up, and put a brick upon another brick, but something very upsetting is creeping about inside me telling me to play the piano, because I need to be plugged in to something I can talk to in a different language even though I get replies I'm not quite sure I understand, but which do actually seem to answer my questioning fingers.
If you play the chord of G and listen to it reverberate you do hear something that perhaps you needed to hear, if you are silent and if you listen with your whole body. You are not exactly listening to feelings, you are doing the opposite. You are feeling to hear.
Perhaps I am tired, and dissatisfied, and my ego is making much of a very little. Perhaps I am only dropping asleep here listening to the slight wavering reverberation of the chord of G.
Finally I get up from the piano and go to bed. At least the building will come to an end, but I will always be able to play music.


Another month of work on the building and things are beginning to get straight. The drains are in, the kitchen floor is down. There is now a flight of stairs rising up from the back hallway to the bedrooms. I build a set of kitchen cupboards, and sweep through the room. We have one clean room which is finished, almost. I can now finish off the hallway and the room that will be my study.
The upstairs is still a mess, but at least we have part of the house that is tidy and clean.
I ring Annabel and tell her she can come home.

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