Of tears and forgetting
Sunday morning I crawl downstairs after an uneasy bout of sleep, flip on the television and catch the young Olivia Hussey sobbing tempestuously in Romeo and Juliet. I sit for a while, blinking, trying to empathize, to let the movie take me. But I get distracted. I remember playing the theme from this film on my piano years ago, wondrous and wide-eyed at the beauty that streamed from my own fingertips. Then I remember my all-time favorite piece, the one I played obsessively during my first year in college: Chopin’s Nocturne in C Sharp Minor. I don’t remember how I got around to playing this piece, and don’t know why I took up playing the piano again after 4 years of not touching the keys even once, but I would take this little piece down to the gray-walled and mildew-stained basement of our dormitory building, shut myself up in a “music” room a little bigger than a bathroom stall, and open up the piano that is literally falling apart from age and disuse.
And I would play. Certain boys visited me, on whom I had vague but rather fanciful crushes on. They never came together, I remember, and never acknowledged the other. Each time one would come looking for me, my heart would skip a beat and somehow the sounds I created in that little room seemed a little more magical, and that much more poignant. Embarrassed by this recollection, and entirely shamed that I had completely forgotten about this piece for what seemed like years, I look for it online. Then I am pleasantly surprised, even thrilled, to find that this very piece was used as a theme for Roman Polanski’s latest and greatest, The Pianist. I think of the story, and shudder at how very eerily appropriate it is, and remember how much I love-am enchanted by-seeing my beloved pieces being performed on stage or on screen. I check the time, hungering to see the film, only to find out that I am 20 minutes too late. I sit, unreasonably grieved, turn off my phone, and proceed to curl myself up in a comma and read my old favorites-Hesse, Kundera, Shreve-back to back: a veritable literary binge. Old comforts, so that I won’t forget, so that I don’t feel the sadness creeping up from the seams of...
Why do I have to remember? I must be carrying myself into an oblivion called adulthood, and that is never good. I don’t want to have to remember.