146 Things To Do Besides Self-Harm [Taken from this.]
18. play a musical instrument
Somewhere along the line, it had become a habit. The piano was an archaic thing, a remnant from a life Raphael had spent too many decades trying to forget, but its strings had yet to wear thin and its keys bore only a single crack. He always runs his finger across it before he played, a ritual he’d never tried to shake.
The whole thing was a ritual, really. The feeling would rise, would unfurl hot beneath his skin and itch at veins that had been cold and dead for longer than they’d been alive. It would settle at the soft skin of his wrists, curl around him like chains or handcuffs or rope ready to burn through his flesh, and he would spend as long as he could trying to pretend it wasn’t there before finally giving in.
Once, giving in had meant something different. Now, it means excusing himself from the company he always keeps (it’s funny, what losing the people you love to something as trivial as time can do for your comfortability with loneliness) and slipping away to the back room of his condo, the door slammed shut and locked behind him. His steps are always loud, here in the silence of a room that has never welcomed anyone but him and yet is heavy with the memories of a thousand different faces.
The first touch is a reverent one. The piano is old; a relic, a piece of something he isn’t sure whether he wants to lose or hold tightly onto. It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship once, his mother’s pride and joy. Her hands were always so light when they danced across it, her smile so serene as she sang breathlessly along. It was the most expensive thing they’d ever owned, and the most priceless.
His fingers rake through the thin layer of dust that always settles between his visits, never frequent enough to keep it from settling at all. His throat becomes dry, his eyes straying to the spiderweb crack on the middle C key, and the bench makes a creaking sound as he pulls it from beneath the hulking beast. In the moments before he raises his fingers to play, it is always a daunting monster with chomping jaws, waiting to devour him if he doesn’t please it. A feeling of fear unfurls in his chest and the burning at his wrists becomes a pressing thing, a demand.
He strokes a single finger across the crack in the most-used key. The ridges of it are perfectly imperfect.
And this, here - the first moment of impact, the first ring of melodic sound through the empty room - is what keeps him coming back. It’s the reason the piano sits here still, over fifty years after its obtainment, and why this is always a private routine, and a private shame.
The music, always the same opening song and then a new one each time, is a rush of water soothing the burn at his wrists. He closes his eyes and it’s all that there is, just the sound of Juventino Rosa’s Over The Waves followed closely by the memory of his mother, with black hair instead of grey, curled over the keys and laughing as he stumbled over the fourth bar for the fifth time. It’s the only time he can remember the life before this one without wanting to go back and change it.
When he’s done, though, and there’s nothing left ringing through the room but the echo of a final note and the clammer of the fallboard dropping back into place, shame takes hold of the places he can never wash clean, no matter how many songs he plays. He crosses the room like a criminal caught just before the act, slinking away with a panicked heart and a resolve never to do this again. Never to need this again.
It never lasts. A day or a week or two months later, the back room of his condo always welcomes its sole visitor back again, arms open and the crack in the key waiting to soothe the cracks inside of him.
