“Chopin and the Grateful Dead”

Boston, Massachusetts.

I wake up to piano notes—Chopin’s First Nocturne. As the notes flicker and hesitate, plodding gracefully and overlapping through some leftover segment of last night’s dream, I know that downstairs, my dad is playing his mother’s old music sheets. He told me that it was always a sign that my grandmother was happy when she played the piano. I remember listening to her play in her house, where the radiator demon in the basement angrily hummed and threatened to get me if I didn’t run up the stairs fast enough late at night. In my childhood home, the piano endured the hands of my sister and me as we practiced. Now, I just like to listen.

A skylight drips blue sky and bare branches onto my face. If notes were colors I’d see magenta squares, blue dots, and neon green bars fading past my eyes. These are transient moments solidified through my unfolding memory of this. On Sunday, I will take the bus back to Brooklyn. This piano will fade into a band and it is, like the Grateful Dead sing, “such a long, long time to be gone and a short time to be there.” It’s a memory box fading fast, rolling into tomorrow and the day after that, and that.

–Camille Dourmashkin-Cagol