Keys

The room was not stark white, as I had once imagined it’d be, but submerged in dynamic shades of violet and blue.

“This place …” I said to the woman gripping my hand. My voice was strained and quiet, but it was trying.

“What about this place?” the woman asked.

Her voice was familiar with its deep tone of control. The sound elicited overwhelming feelings I had once experienced, when life had been bursting with movement and meaning. Never-ending chores, family dramas, life milestones. Now the days had grown long, with nothing to do but watch the light change from the rocking chair in my sun room.

I squinted my eyes at this woman, trying to understand her features, but time had reclaimed my sight.

“Do you like it here?” she asked.

No matter how I squinted or tilted my head, the woman’s appearance remained a blurry outline of a human form. Solid against the liquid hues behind her, but lost amongst my deteriorating senses, nonetheless.

I watched the shades of blue melt into the violet and suddenly wondered if every room had been given a special show of light. “The colors…” I said in between labored breaths.

“Colors?” the woman’s voice wavered, as if the word were a question. I could feel her shift in her seat.

“Yes,” I said. I released a nervous breath, hoping my lungs would clear so they could fill with my mind’s thoughts once more. The wet sound dispersed the colors on the wall before they joined back together. “The colors are beautiful. But not at all what I had imagined.”

I felt the woman’s smile in the softening of her grip.

“Well, what did you imagine?” she asked. Her voice had gained control again, and I heard the sound like an itch in the back of my mind.

I can feel who you are, I thought. But who are you?

Without an answer, I tried to at least consider the woman’s question: What did you imagine? I studied the walls for inspiration, with their dancing shades, and tried to remember.

“I…” I repeated my pronoun, but the one-syllable word felt like a weight.

Someone began making low, desperate sounds. After a while, I realized the rattling was coming from my own chest. It looked nothing like the chest in my memories. This chest was marked with deep wrinkles of time and dark spots of sun damage. It didn’t rise and fall with the push and pull of excitement and fear but seemed to be collapsing on itself.

The realization that this stranger’s chest was my own brought me back to my first shower after giving birth to my daughter. After long months of carrying the force of life, I had stepped into the steaming water and realized that I was to be alone with my body once again. I might as well have been showering with a stranger. I remembered the way my knuckles turned white. They grasped the railing of the hospital shower, and I tried not to collapse from the disorientating pain of it all.

The woman’s grip tightened. “You there?”

“I… I don’t remember,” I finally admitted. “What was your question?”

“Nothing,” the woman was quick to say.

We lingered in silence for a long time, and I wondered if part of me was still in that hospital shower. I wondered if parts of my identity would always remain in the spaces that had cut me open and handed me back in pieces. The powder room of my parents’ house, where the dark red blood trailed down my unshaven legs. I had watched the blood with a mixture of pride and fear. Somehow, I had known, even then, that I would never experience life the same now that I was becoming a woman. The first home James and I had purchased, with its shiny hardwood floors. I had kept those floors clear of discarded socks, our daughter’s toys, stray pens, forgotten notepads. I had swept and polished those floors until they contained blurry yet bright reflections. My piano had sat on those floors, day after day, year after year. The wooden instrument remained grand in size and equally immaculate in its appearance, until it became nothing more than an expensive piece of décor.

“If you could go back to any moment in your life…” The woman’s voice carried me out of these spaces that contained my lost pieces. I was back in a stiff bed, holding her hand. I was about to ask her who she was, but my voice had grown slow from too much experience. Her’s carried on effortlessly. She finished her question with wonder and ease.

“What moment would you go back to?” she asked.

“Any moment?” I repeated the question. My mind sat up, but my body remained heavy.

“Yes, any moment in your life.”

Memories started to pool around me. I felt myself submerging into the ghosts of my former selves. I watched from a viewpoint that had been hidden before, as if I had become an audience member in my own life.

I was a child tightly held in my parents’ arms and then, just as swift, released into the vast air. I was celebrating my fifth year, with my great-grandmom next to me. She was urging me to make a wish. I transformed into a preteen girl sitting on the edge of a wooden bench. My spine remained straight and my chin cast downward with control and intention. Long, capable fingers pressed on white and black keys, and dramatic melodies filled the space of my elementary, then high school, auditorium, until the auditorium transformed into a concert hall, and there I was again, a young woman with a straight spine and closed eyes, pressing into the black and white keys in the order I had created from my mind. I watched my performance begin, and I watched it end. Then I saw him. James. He had his long sideburns and kind brown eyes. He was sitting at the end of a bar, as if waiting for me. I watched a version of myself walk off the stage to close the distance between me and that man, and I watched a different version of myself marry him.

I watched the moment my baby emerged from the heavenly world of my body into this side of the earth. I listened to her cry take up the whole space of the hospital the way my music once had. And then I began to watch that baby grow and change day after day after day, until a different version of myself woke up one year and didn’t recognize the pictures hanging in the hallway of my house, let alone the reflection that stared at me in the mirror.

All of these memories flowed into the next as if they were a sequence of dreams. As I watched myself grow older, my posture both shrinking and straightening and shrinking through the passage of time, I wondered if maybe it all had been a dream. I was reaching out to grasp each moment, but there was nothing to hold onto anymore. The spaces I had once frequented continued to change. The people in my memories had either grown out of themselves or already passed through this world.

“Mom?” The word pulled me back to the blue and violet shades of the room. The colors were transforming all around me as if in a dynamic dance of life.

Mom, the word replayed in my mind. When I looked for the curly-haired girl of my memories, the one who had once clung to my shirts with tiny fists and repeated “Mom” as if it were my only identity, all I could see was a fuzzy outline of a woman I no longer knew.

“Mom…” the voice was choking up now. The woman gripped my hand tighter, as if she were little again, clinging to me like I could be her safe space once more.

“Valerie?” I heard an old, hoarse voice ask only to realize it was my own. “So, it was you all along.”

“Yes, Mom. I’m Valerie. Who did you think I was?” she laughed, but it was fragile.

I tried to focus on the question. There had been quite a few asked, and I was afraid I was losing track. Before I could think of my response, my daughter wrapped her arms around me.

How big she had grown. I once again thought of her small fists that had clung to my shirt. I thought I had been tired then, but I had been tired with a new burst of life. It was nothing like the exhaustion that plagued me now.

I tried to reciprocate my daughter’s hug, wanting to linger in the memory of holding her close when she was just a few weeks old. Before she had gone to college. Before the divorce. Before she had chased a job across the country. I wanted to hold her in my arms and pace across that small apartment with the peeling paint. I wanted to wake once more to soothe her cries in those dark hours of the night, when it had felt like we lived in our own, separate world.

“I love you so much, Mom,” my daughter said, but the familiar sound of her voice wavered.

I lingered in the embrace of my daughter, wondering if I could take this love with me. At some point in time, the world that had once given so much had begun to take and take and take. But at this moment, the love between my daughter and I, no matter how far she had moved and how busy her life had become, seemed immune to the cruel powers of time.

“I love you too, my Valley,” I said. The old nickname flowed out of me with ease.

“You never answered my question,” my daughter released her grip. I could see her blurry form moving away as her words tried reaching me.

What did you imagine? The question rang through my mind. I could feel my body tense, and I suddenly remembered I was in pain. Faint beeps began to swirl through the room, making the shades of blue and violet relax and contract into one another as if they were ocean waves washing across the room, ready to envelop us all.

I tried to relax into their movement. The beeps continued.

Maybe the sound was some sort of medicine. I considered this as I felt the weight of the world I didn’t know I had been carrying melt out of me. The shades of color started to brighten, then fade, as sunlight poured through the window.

“If you could go back to any moment in your life, what would it be?” My daughter’s question pulled me back into my body’s pain, though it no longer sounded like her voice. It was spoken like whispers of wind through trees.

I heard myself groan with an agitated, collapsed chest. “Oh, Valerie,” I heard myself groan again. “I can’t.”

I suddenly realized how loud the room had grown, between the machine beeps and the human chatter, and I wondered who all these voices belonged to.

“If you could go back in time,” the same whisper asked. Every word that was spoken by this voice seemed to strip the room of its color. “Where would you go?”

I thought of my younger self, onstage for the first time. The shadowy figures of the listless audience, their identities hidden by the spotlights that were illuminating me. The wave of calm that had washed over me once my lungs had filled with life and my fingers had pressed the first keys. It was a moment before the blood, before the man, before the traumatic euphoria of checking off each life milestone until realizing there was only one left.

“But it was before you,” I tried saying to my daughter, but I could no longer see even her blurred form against the brightness of the sun. “I don’t want to go without you.”

“Oh, Mom,” my daughter’s voice was clear in the empty room. “I’ll be with you. I promise.”

The beeps stopped. A lethargic ring took their place. I closed my eyes against the sun, its brightness suddenly unbearable against my weary eyes.

For a moment, I disappeared into the inky world behind my eyelids. My body felt lighter. All of the pain had left, and I wondered if I could linger in this vast darkness forever. My daughter’s voice reached out to me. It was a melancholic sound, but it filled my body with a sense of urgency.

“I’m with you, Mom. I love you.”

I opened my eyes and felt a dizzy disorientation. Bright lights beamed down on me. A piano was in front of me. My chest rose and fell with a rapid heartbeat. I looked at my hands reaching for the keys, and the sight of them felt like a miracle.

Traces of a memory, as if I had been in this place before, tugged my mind, but the listless audience was before me, waiting for me to perform.