"Don't cry." It's funny how those words always made me cry harder. Tears started to fall on the keys, and I quickly wiped them away with my wet sleeves, ashamed. His words drilled through me ceaselessly, unaffected by my sobs. Kids weren't supposed to cry doing things they liked, right? I was 6.
Sometimes during class, he would tell my mom and me stories about his training and how he once played so much his fingers bled onto the piano, but he’d wipe the blood off with a rag nearby and keep going. So, in that damp basement under a single, bright incandescent lamp, I learned about self-loathing.
I hadn't felt much joy since I started taking piano lessons, even with other teachers. Before I began them, few things made me as happy as trying to copy my brother in everything, whether his words, thoughts, or actions. One of those actions was playing the piano. The moment he stopped practicing and left the room was the moment I hopped on to attempt to imitate exactly what he played. It was a puzzle, a challenge, a game.
Eventually, I learned to read sheet music. I remember learning Fur Elise. In kindergarden, my school's music teacher found out I could play, and one day asked me to show her after the class had left. Impressed, she asked my parents if I could play at the school's annual PTA meeting. "Just the first section," they all agreed, which was the entirety of what I'd learned in my lessons. But right before I went on stage, I apparently looked my teacher in the eye and said that I was going to play the whole piece, whether they liked it or not.
I sat on stage for a long time, motionless. My teacher eventually came up to me and asked what was wrong. "I need someone to turn the pages," I said meekly, as relieved laughter swept through the crowd. She agreed to stand next to me and do so. I played the whole piece, in kindergarten, in front of a crowd of a couple hundred parents, teachers, and kids, evidently before I learned about stage fright. I'm told I got a standing ovation. Afterwards, my parents were beaming. Surely, they believed, I was destined for some sort of greatness.
Of course, my parents' insistence on taking lessons inevitably migrated from my brother to me. And what was once a vivid and limitless universe of possibility became a formulaic, weekly regimen. Throughout grade school I had at least five piano teachers, at my mother's behest. It was like a doctor's appointment. Something's wrong with your wrists. Let me cut your nails before we get started. They prescribed much practice, which I often did not do. They told me much advice, which I did not like. I nodded yes, but my mind was elsewhere in some other reverie.
I nodded yes, but I never spoke. I played, but I never practiced. And why would I? The magic was gone. There was no game to play, only rules to follow. Worse, there was the occasional nocturnal nightmare: an audition, an opportunity to play in front of judges who wrote essays about you after you finished playing as you wonder what to do with your hands. Scribbling of pens when you expected some applause, or at least silence. We auditioned for some reason. Everyone at the events seemed to know the reason. I never knew the reason, or the cadence, which confused and terrified me. It only recently occurred to me that I may have been auditioning for something. But it didn't matter, because for me, here, I learned about anxiety.
Yet paradoxically, some broken sense of identity had formed. For my middle school's talent show, I auditioned with the Mario theme that I shoddily learned by ear. "That was great," said one teacher judge. "Perhaps you could wear a Mario hat when you perform on stage!" Another judge nodded wholeheartedly. I didn't get selected.
"You should've played some adult pieces," my brother suggested, which failed to cheer me up. I hated those pieces, never knowing why anyone would listen to them. Boring to listen to, boring to play.
The next year, on a week long science field trip, I ignored signs to audition for the trip's talent show. It was beneath me. It was not beneath my classmate, who happily played the third movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, a piece famous for its difficulty. Her playing was flawless, beautiful. And she didn't take it seriously, pausing a few times to comment on pieces of dust left on the keys, which drew laughter from the whole theater. As she finished, everyone immediately stood to clap. I was too proud, and briefly sat with my arms folded before realizing how ridiculous I looked.
Who did she think she was? It can't be that hard. I could do that if I really wanted. This was *my* hobby. When I went home, I printed out sheet music and started learning the movement. I never finished.
There was solace at school, where I participated in after-school jazz band. Here, I can feel good about myself. The other piano guy didn't play since he was 4. The other piano guy didn't take lessons since he was 5. After a while, no one cared much about my classical chops that I always showed off before practice. Oh well, I didn't care about chords, or girls from Ipanema.
At the annual performance, we played our songs, and it came time for my solo. The band teacher motioned to me. But I sat there, as people looked to me. Motionless, solo.
"What happened, man?" he would later ask. I don't know what happened. I don't know what a jazz solo is supposed to be. I don't even know what jazz is.
Later that year, perhaps in an act of pity, band teacher thought it would be great for me to at least use what piano abilities I did have to play at the school French Club's breakfast event.
"Play some Debussy. Americans love that stuff," said my piano teacher at the time. I spent much time pondering her statement. They do? I'm an American, right? Why don't I?
They did in fact love it, at least as much as they enjoyed the croissants from Costco. As I played my Arabesques and Claires de Lune, I realized there was beauty emerging in the midst of the sounds. Somehow, I could be delicate and yet still command some deep, broad tones that felt larger, more profound than me. The pieces weren't known for their difficulty, yet people still clapped in that classroom for an inexperienced middle school nerd slouching on an aged middle school upright. Here, I could say for the first time honestly, "This sounds nice."
When high school came, my parents and I decided that I was too busy to continue lessons. Though we never vocalized it, tacit in our agreement was acknowledgment that I wasn't nearly good enough to pursue it. A good excuse came, as my piano teacher at the time was moving to either Sweden or Switzerland to live with her new fiancé. It was a shame though, because it was while I was her student that I really started treating it as an artform rather than a chore. She helped me feel my playing and truly express emotion. I actually talked to her.
"That's good," she said when I told her I was quitting. "Er, not 'good'," she quickly corrected, "but good to know." If it was a freudian slip, I was okay with it. At some point during these years, I came to terms with who I was, and, more importantly, who I wasn't. I'm not going to be great at piano, and I probably never will be. I had to drop extracurricular pursuits like that, to make room for whatever impromptu fantasies would come next from my parents.
When I got into college, the blurbs I sent to each of my roommate candidates all contained: "I like music, I play piano and guitar and sing." In one reply, a classmate said, "I used to play piano as a kid but I quit once I entered high school." We also shared the same last name.
There's a beautiful thing about going off to a university far from home. Distance from everything you've ever known facilitates reinvention, and exposure to a diverse student body allows for profound reframing of all your thoughts, beliefs, and personalities. Thanks to a tip from a friend, I rented a key to access practice rooms in the music building, each with a grand piano. There I found serenity, in the basement of the music hall at midnight. However cold and unfamiliar the campus after dark, there was some semblance of familiarity on the benches. Blank canvases for exploration or nostalgia, video game or classical.
I reflected on this in muffled silence, sounds of musicians through the walls. Enclosed, warm, I learned about art.