Melanie Hamon
The key of C has run off again. Power-hungry and ringing with that bright note of laughter, she traipses through the pages of the Courante. In the off-white landscape she raises obstacles: rearing mountains from her arpeggiated chords, and spilling waterfalls from her slurred downward scales. Seated, my arms and legs braced like a fortress ready to cave in around her, I grab at the imp and miss.
The fingertips of my left hand hurl themselves selflessly up and down the strings, always clumsy, always a half-second behind. My right elbow flaps like the wing of a goose as I tilt the bow, bouncing back and forth between the strings. I must be careful, for if I scratch, she’ll spook. My back becomes a hissing snake, leaning over the notes and poised to strike one second, but straightening out to maintain healthy distance away the next.
The worst part: in her ravenous glee, she has stolen notes! As she leaps upward in pitch, she snags an F# from his neighboring scale, dragging him with her to the center of an arpeggio and making everyone stare. When I’m circling in, she grabs a G# and pushes him against his will higher and higher, reaching for the minor A tonic. Stealing notes and shirking her responsibilities! That minor A, coiled in shadow, resembles my inciting note. As I drag my pinky finger towards the A I slow involuntarily, almost convinced of its culpability, the resolution that was under my nose all along. But I know better, and when I look into A minor’s wide eyes I see: it never intended to tonicize these notes. C major carries the blame.
I resume chase, keeping my fingers close to the strings even as I ask them to navigate the impressionable landscape of my fingerboard. My breath catches as I near her, my eyes forgetting to blink and my head bobbing on its slender neck, imitating her rhythm. The tension purses my lips and clenches my teeth; it leaks into my feet and lifts them off the ground, threatening to whisk me away. My thumb seizes as my fingers race and I slip, right hand collapsing inward, dragging the bow crooked into space.
But it doesn’t matter – I’ve caught her. Her short, rapid kicks echo in the chambers of my instrument, and her chime rings out, singing and pushing those low vibrations into the whole space of my ear canal, the whole room around me, into my whole caffeine-fueled heart. It is the deepest breath I have taken in years, the quietest my voice has ever spoke, the closest I’ve ever come to flying. I close my eyes and relax again, resting my shoulders, my thighs, my neck and my fists. Together, we have reached home.
We are at rest.
And then behind my closed eyelids, the page turns noisily. I fly awake, arms up and ready to take off, but she has already snuck into the Sarabande.