Postlude

It was late, I was tired but sleep has been eluding me so I sat at the piano and played my favourite pieces all slow and gentle-like. Moonlight Sonata, Fur Elise, and Oasis's Wonderwall. I played to the best of my ability, it has been too long since I touched the black and ivory keys, too long since I needed the piano to soothe my soul because writing. . . seemed like an impossible feat sometimes. Words like whirlwinds in my mind, I couldn't put them into coherent sentences, not just yet.

A stray thought flitted through my mind; I used to call M. on her mobile, knowing it will go to voice mail, I would play the piano for her to listen later. I remember M. liked Rachmaninoff's Scheherezade, the simple version of it that I could play anyway. We were 16, she was in boarding school and I missed her everyday.

I thumbed the spine of L. (M.'s 'wild-dog' literary friend) wedding gift for M. which he had ask me to later pass to M; Tennyson to Whitman. Volume III of Harvard's Classics' English Poetry. It's such a lovely book, leather bound, the pages gilded with gold, and it's not a crisp new copy at all. It has the softened feel of an aged copy.

I idly leafed through the volume until something catches my eye;

                  The Last Wish

Since all that I can ever do for thee 

Is to do nothing, this my prayer must be:

That thou mayst never guess nor ever see

The all-endured this nothing-done costs me.