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Mari’s first great love is piano, and this is not a lie but it is a falsification; she sits surrounded by sheet music, pencil between her teeth, and writes her love letters: a scratched out rit . moved two bars back, crescendo here, staccato, staccato, stop, repeat—better this time, better next time. Outside the piano room, her parents. Her brother. Mewo. She never wonders what they are doing, only what they can hear through the door.
She believes in maintaining some distance, in being not viewed but heard and so nonetheless seen. But, too, she imagines the distance is not so vast. Imagines that each breath taken or withheld between the onset of each note is as poignant as the note itself, simply because this is the thing that keeps her fingers moving, her ability to breathe.
~
Sunny wields the violin tenderly, with care, like a weapon. His notes are extensive, vibrate in their depth; he seeks with his bow to carve out something akin to permanence and Mari does not know how to make him believe that it is not that which remains that stays but rather the absence of what was.
She listens to him. Legato, extant; she dares not stop him, but suggests at the end, here, “With more movement,” and he stares at her that way he does sometimes, so she does not know whether he agrees with her or not, whether he has even heard her properly.
But he must have, because then he nods. She points to the beginning, here. “Try again,” she says, kindly.
~
If Mari’s greatest love were indeed music, it would sound like this: rich, vibrant.
Mari picks the duet for them. It is soft, elegant. The violin sustains, even after the piano has dulled. Even after it has faded.
~
“The song can’t stay the same,” she tells him. “Change with it, or it might change without you—and leave you all alone!”
~
“It has to grow, Sunny. Breathe through it, and grow with it.” She smiles at him. “Try again.”
~
“Music has motion,” she reminds him. “Don’t be afraid to move with it.”
~
“Have you been practicing?” she asks him. “You need to work on this part if we’re going to be able to play it together.”
~
“We can try it together tomorrow,” she promises him. “Practice on your own for now. I don’t have time today.”
~
“You can try it again.” She frowns at him. “Can’t you?”
~
In Mari’s vision of it, their recital is a moment of epiphany. The song encircles them, moves with them, and becomes secondary to them. Their friends and family hear them breathe with it; watch them become it.
And then the violin rings out its last plea, and they stand and clap and Sunny and Mari are there with the ghost of it, charmed memory. They stand in its wake and it washes over them and it is something shared, eternal, but only because it is gone.
She stands poised to make it happen. Battles the stillness. Insists, “We should run it through at least one more time.”
But she misjudged. The song is soft, fragile. It unburdens itself with a crack and, in the aftermath, dozens of misaligned shards, which cannot breathe so cannot sustain. There is nowhere to place her fingers, though she longs for the steadiness of it, and they come to stillness where her breath falls short. There is nothing to hear; the vibrant disintegration of the final note collapses and loses its weight. Becomes a dim ache. Unseen.