Gary tells me I’m playing at breakfast today.
“Playing what?” I ask.
“Anything you want,” he answers.
“The piano in the dining hall isn’t tuned.”
“No one cares. We just want to hear you play,” he says. “You used to play for us all the time. Meals aren’t the same without it.”
I’ve heard them say this before. Each one, in turn, as if they are primary-school children practicing for a play. They may know how to do many things, but acting isn’t one of them.
It won’t stop—the thwap-thwap-thwap.
I dreamed last night that it’s Kenneth coming to rescue me. I miss the most mediocre things. Junk food. Movies. I miss chewing gum, even though I never chewed it much back in the real world. I miss people—any people. I miss walking during rush hour in a big city.
“Why don’t you play something classical?” Gary asks.
I get out of bed and get dressed in the same clothing I wore yesterday. There is still garden dirt on the knees. I don’t think I should play classical. If Gary had asked me to play punk rock, I wouldn’t want to play that, either.
At breakfast, we sit around our usual tables and eat whatever we have. I eat two hard-boiled eggs and a handful of strawberries. Gary tells me I should eat toast because the bread is going stale. I say, “Let it go stale.”
I think: Everything is stale.
I sit at the piano before the others are finished eating. They pretend not to notice, but I see them smiling at one another. Until I play a half-baked dubstep track that’s been running through my head—that’s when they stop smiling. It’s old. Probably from the 1990s. I wrote it before dubstep had a name. It has lyrics, but I don’t sing them because they don’t allow swearing here. When I finish and look up at their faces, it’s the same look I used to get in high school—a mix of disappointment and sheer confusion.
Whatever.
They clap when I stand up, and I give an animated bow, grab a third hard-boiled egg, and go back to the house.
Gary says, skipping to keep up with me, “Seems silly to waste time on this hip-hop rubbish when you’re capable of the classics.”
“What are the classics?” I ask. “Do you want me to write a Gregorian chant because your college professor in the one music class you took in 1979 told you it’s relevant?”
“You’re not yourself,” he says.
I’m not myself. I am a ham sandwich without the ham. I am a blue sky on a Monday and a rainy Wednesday.
I didn’t think I loved Kenneth when he was here. Now I think about him all the time. Cliché isn’t supposed to exist here, but it does. I didn’t know what I had until it was gone. I threw the baby out with the bathwater. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. I’ve been looking at the world through rose-tinted glasses.
It’s not so great, you know.
There is no such thing as individuality when one is part of a collective of people who think they’re all individuals. It’s a little like being part of a motorcycle club. The idea was to take off on my own and be free. Instead, I’m barreling down an imaginary road alongside a bunch of loud, unruly children.