9.

The mission: Take a simple idea and explore it, using everything you’ve learned (not nearly enough), and in real time build tone and rhythm, and birth something authentic, moving, beautiful even.  

14.

We sit thigh to thigh on her piano bench, her jeans against my skirt and bare leg. “Like this,” she says, dropping her hand in an augmented seventh. It is effortless for her. Harmonies, tonalities, rhythms. “Like this,” she says, nodding to me, and I find the shape and rest my hand over hers, my breath trembling, the heady scent of cigarillo floating in her hair.

15.  

“Are you pressing keys ,” she says, “or allowing the music?”  

“Are you creating sounds...or hearing them?”

24.

We stand so near her breath finds my lips.

“You are my student. You are married.”

“We can’t do this,” she says.   

25.

Occasionally a craving races into my body, not letting on what it is, only that it is. After a brief jolt it leaves—allowing moments when I can settle, look at my life and say, Okay . . . until the craving comes back.

It always comes back. 

34.

Con abbandono the tempo reads. With abandon.  

Meaning, heed no ‘please slow down’.

Meaning, do not rethink, do not look back.

Meaning, on and on you go, a mad acceleration

            until that last spectacular note sizzles in the electric air.

45.

“Coraggio, Lisa, coraggio.” Magda leaned close, gripping my hand. The room with its ceiling-high windows, the bed blanketed in white. A wooden cross nailed above the door.

La Quiete (The Calm), the private clinic—a  magnificent villa above Varese—where my son would be born.

“Oggi nasce un miracolo,” Magda, blessed midwife, promised as the contractions gained in intensity, tumbling one upon the other. Hour after hour she calmly encouraged, then raised her voice with mine when I began to shout.

46.

Coraggio, I write, large letters, on a found scrap of worn cardboard, a remnant from that final cross-country move four years ago, the one I told his dear parents who sat then in the kitchen with me sipping coffee as I peeled potatoes, that after nineteen years together and already eight moves, three of them international, that this one might possibly be the end to everything.

124.

In May, I plant tomato seedings beneath an empty moon. I love you I love you, I sing to them, a mini prayer. I stab a couple tiny sticks into the ground, crutches to keep them upright. I need you to live.