Novell (May 2007)
Te Koop
I sit and watch. Her shoulders as they move up and down, back and forth, like slipping away from each other. Listening. She said it was one of Chopin. I'm not interested in classical music and therefore, she thinks that I am somewhat ignorant. I can not help it. My interests must be seized by something, I have to dig into and dig up things to satisfy my curiosity. I can not read music and accept them. I can not read music at all.
Yesterday I was standing in her bathroom and thought. Of the fifteen minutes I had for myself, I was ten in the shower and five in front of the large mirror on the wall. I thought of my twenty birthday, how I would remember the bathroom. The hot pink walls, the modern shower. The house with big windows and window sills of marble. Something in the house smelled foreign, as if it belonged to them and not me. They lived in Belgium, in a house in a small town at the German border. Indoors it smelled of fried vegetables, polished floors and freshly washed windows. Outdoors in their garden grew flowers. I have a picture of me when I walk in the path leading from the house to the garden. I am turned away from the camera. Around the time grows tulips, cornflowers, dandelions. I must remembering wrong, there could be no dandelions.
chair I sit in is made of wicker and cracking sounds when I change position but she does not seem to care. She played on, loud and violent exercise, and she presses the keys. Through the door curved glass wind died down, the dark clouds appear on the otherwise blue sky. A couple of raindrops falling on the roof. Something is moving inside me. A lump, a wave, a feeling of nausea. She sits crouched in front of the piano as a small, old man who must cover themselves from the wind. The melody is beautiful. How many people do not listen to this song and felt like an insect under sole of the shoe? Where nothing penetrates, live music. As for the woman whose husband cut off her finger because she loved another. He could chop off her head and she would not touch a mine. So I sit, quietly so as not to disturb, still in my own little storm.
Her fingers stop pushing and clamoring. The melody stops as abruptly as it began. She straightens his back and turning the pages of his sheet music. Now the rain splashed against the windows and cool the green bushes out there. Everything here is perfect. I wonder if I could sit like this in my entire life without having to touch me, as long as she played and the rain rippled. Now a different tune, a brittle and light. Her fingers glide over the keys. The piano is vibrating tones. A small bird, a delicate flower. I sit in their houses, in their chair. I am far from home. Nothing to see here reminds me of where I come from. I feel lost but also satisfying. Also new areas of mine has been opened, who would have thought that this could make me happy? And the music that lurks and wrap me up in that sweet, thick feeling of contentment. I'm happy, I'm happy. Only she does. Only I can sit here.
Around the home her mother runs away from the rain with newly bought pastries from the bakery in a package for arm.
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