Flash Fiction Project

Ivory and Ebony

I'm mature enough to understand that death is a part of being human.

I also understand that another part of being human is being able to accept death and cope with its cold and unforgiving negative emotional consequences.

I learned this lesson when I was sixteen years old. The very year my mother passed away.

She had been diagnosed with stage three pancreatic cancer when about six months before she met her fate. Iit had been a shock to our family to say the least. My father and two sisters were devastated, but I always argue not more than me. I had a special kind of relationship with my mother. She wasn't just my maternal figure, she was my best friend. When she eventually died in the arms of my father at St. Thomas Aquinas Hospital, I felt that a part of me had become frozen, yet perpetually on fire. It was a feeling like no other emotion I had ever felt before.

My mother was everything. She taught me everything I knew and loved. How to ride a bike, how to write in cursive, but most importantly, how to play the piano.

My piano was really how I coped with my loss. I remember getting home from school, disheveled and depressed, and my day would brighten just by seeing my ivory and ebony friends sitting in my living room. I would throw my backpack down on the floor, and race to the keys. I'd play everything: classics, contemporary pieces, video game music, pop songs. But my favorite was "Moonlight Sonata" by Beethoven. It was one of the first complicated pieces I ever learned with my mother, and I held it very dear to my heart. I still do.

Thinking of my mother, I began to play "Moonlight Sonata" one day after school, its gentle yet haunting melody escaping my fingertips and enveloping me in a blanket of rhythm and sound. The melody I was playing immediately caused me to weep. "Mom," I muttered, "I miss you so damn much." I continued the song, its melody morphing into a dramatic and heartrending symphony, stronger than the one I was playing before. My eyes were flooded with tears, and the only way I knew what I was playing was from muscle memory. I began to sob, the tears burning my eyes. But I didn't have the emotional strength to wipe them.

Then, the most stupefying, mystifying thing happened. Through the blurriness of my tears, I saw her. My mother. She was dressed in her white bedgown, and she almost seemed to be swimming upon the blackness of the piano.

She was smiling.

I began to smile, something I hadn't done in months.

I felt comfort as I continued the sonata with a newfound smile on my face, knowing that my mother was, and will always be, with me.