My name is called.
The usher's palm opens like a quiet door. The stagehand tips his chin to the light. I step out.
The stage takes me the way the ocean takes a stone. No ripple. No fuss. Just heat and a circle and the black curve of the piano like a lake with glass skin.
I walk without pep. No rhythm to borrow from the crowd. Shoes on wood, a dull thud that the hall doesn't care to carry. The air has that held-breath texture rooms get before they choose to like you or not.
The room is quiet and tense. All watching me.. I'm remembered as a prodigy, but a marionette to my mother
I couldn't care less about what others thought of me however. I have already set things right once before. These demons have been faced
I stop beside the bench. I let my eyes pass over the crowd once.
Faces blur, then separate. Programs make pale rectangles in laps. A parent presses a finger on a restless knee. Someone's shoe buckle throws a tiny sun.
Then I see it.
A black plush by the aisle. Button eyes. Crooked stitching. Round ears. To anyone else, a nothing.
To me, the cat from my dreams.
My chest tightens in the way elevators make your blood pretend not to move.
"You are haunted eternally..."
I don't answer.
The bench gives a polite creak when I sit. Hands on my thighs. The fabric's cool. The hush gets sharper, like the room sharpened a knife and set it down between us.
I look into the lights on purpose. Better to blind yourself than be surprised. Dust moves like slow snow through the beam. I lower my eyes to the keys.
Thirty-six black. Fifty-two white. Thin scuffs where other hands have lived.
My fingers find their shape.
Oh well...
Time to get this over with.
The first notes are metal-cold.
Chopin. Études, Op. 25, No. 5. "Wrong-Note."
Kaori chose it for me via pencil spinning lottery. Same note as last life, how coincidental.
I started
Perfection is a posture until it holds you.
I play with economy. No flourish. No gesture you can photograph. I hear key bottoms. Felt catching. The tiny click of the pedal. Una corda shading color, not smearing it. Overtones stacking like sheets of glass.
This is control, I tell myself. This time I hear it. This time I respect it.
The room folds into one instrument. Coughs die. Programs flatten. Judges lift pens, then stop lifting them. No point writing in a blizzard.
The wrong notes bite. The lines run and turn. The wrist stays soft. The mind stays hard.
Bring enough ice into a room and it burns. I feel that flinch pass down the rows. The collar holds heat against my neck. My fingers feel like warmed ceramic.
I could win like this.
Not pride. Arithmetic. Do the work. Don't waste color. Make the judges feel safe, then leave with their certainty.
It was the Playing Kaori warned against. Treated like a chore and done perfectly
The Judges were frozen as I played as well as the crowd. He was no doubt better than anyone should be at this time, he had more experience than anyone here
I continued Face quiet. Hands honest. It's easier not to know who's making the sound.
A seam opens along the edge of my attention. A voice..
It intrudes on my thoughts softly
Don't go... Kousei.....
No volume. All gravity. My hands keep moving—they're better animals than I am. A tremor taps the right wrist bone. Breath catches high. Left hand lays ground under the run. The whisper sits anyway.
Please... don't leave me... I'm scared....
I press harder into exactness. Step stones across floodwater: one-and, two-and, step and step. Sound stays clean. Heart argues with tempo. Lights prick my forehead. The floor under the pedal has a soft rim. Old scar in the wood.
Don't go, Kousei.....Don't leave me all alone....
A keyboard is an orderly country in a world that hates order.
Key lowers hammer. Hammer meets string. String gives pitch. Pitch makes interval. Interval makes a sentence no one has to translate.
Logic should save me.
It doesn't.
Snow.
Not in my ears. Laid over the present like a filter you can't turn off.
Stage light becomes streetlight through a flurry. The piano's curve becomes a roof rail. The bench tilts. Winter from a different life pours in.
I'm on the rooftop with her. In another place, another life.
My hands are on a different surface. A thin coat sleeve gone shine-slick at the elbow. The bend of a shoulder under wet wool. Kaori's head down. Hair in damp threads across her face. Trembling that isn't only cold. Her forehead pressed into my chest, like making herself smaller might stop the air from shaking.
"I don't wanna die, Kousei...."
White breath. Little ghosts.
"Please... don't go. I'm scared."
Her fingers knot the front of my jacket like fabric can anchor someone to the world. Blue shows at the back of her hand where bones push the age line forward. I remember the weight when I tried to pull her closer and there was no closer. I remember thinking how useless warmth is when what hurts isn't cold.
Below us the city looks grayscale. The noise wears a lid.
On stage, my left hand drops a breath and corrects before the line collapses. No one hungry for beauty marks it. The right wrist circles the dissonance and lays it clean.
My body keeps speaking the language it learned under threat.
The piece goes on. I go backward.
Her letter rings. Not a sound. A memory of a sound that teaches rooms to echo.
It doesn't arrive whole. It arrives like shrapnel.
I'm so so so sorry.
Thank you for everything.
Promise me you won't forget me.
I love you, I love you, I love you.
I love you...
Kaori Miyazano loved him
The words overlap where hands are meant to overlap. For a second I think I practiced the wrong voices.
There's a ring inside certain rooms after a loud sound ends—the ghost of it touching the walls. I feel that ring around the first time I carried her letter to the bench and learned eyes aren't strong. Ink bled where the pen paused. The strokes went heavy on choices that were hard. I'd pressed fingers to the page like I could push what spilled back into its lines.
Failed.
The page in memory weighs more than paper.
On stage, breath goes shallow. The damper's click grows too loud because my ears live in my head and my head lives in a room where a girl says she doesn't want to die.
The wrong-note figure lands on time. I count its teeth like pills. The failing isn't in the fingers. It's in believing speech can protect me from hearing.
Don't go, she said, that year on that roof. Please don't go.
Another life. Same mouth. Same eyes rimmed red. Same shake that wants someone else's heat to be a miracle.
I love you....
The mind won't separate memory and present if the weight is right.
Stages turn into roofs when air goes thin.
My hands stop.
I don't tell them to.
They pause like animals when they hear something nameless in brush. Left floats over nothing. Right hangs relaxed, thumb apart, as if mid-sentence and the sentence has walked away.
Silence hits hard enough to make a sound of its own.
Rooms don't understand at first. Belief comes with a grace period. People assume the music is still happening until the evidence piles up.
A judge tilts his head. Another presses lips flat, the way teachers do when a student has turned two pages by mistake and keeps playing out of fear. Pens hover like insects tired of their own wings.
I'm inside the nothing without air. The thing in my chest becomes a fist. Heat climbs my neck into my scalp. Not shame. Not fear. Each wearing the other's jacket.
The light is a wall that doesn't end.
Start, I tell my hands. Start from the last measure. One-and-two-and-three. Lay the left. Soften the right. Be useful.
The whisper rises through wood into bone. In it: snow static. Ink. The thin, brutal dignity of a girl who says thank you while her life burns because she wants the world not to worry.
I can't play a grave.
The sentence arrives whole and refuses to dissolve back into music.
This isn't an instrument.
It's a headstone with keys. A constant reminder of what was. And never will be again.
A program folds in the back. Loudest thing in the building for a breath. Then murmurs wake. Coughs. The delicate, offended hush of people who paid for a miracle and ended up with a boy.
My eyes blur. Keys become a river. If I blink, the tears might not obey. If they don't, I'll need a new country for my face while I'm still living in it.
Judges aren't cruel. They aren't kind. They are a machine that measures what you do while pretending not to look.
I look into the lights because looking down shows the shape I can't command. The burn makes the edge of vision grainy. The ceiling leans close. The walls lean away.
My fingers land on my knees. Not steady.
Someone will call it stage fright. Someone else arrogance. Another person a symptom. None of those words have oxygen in them.
I can't do this, not now.
The chair screams when I push it back. Long. Ugly. The kind of sound that sticks.
Gasps bloom across the first rows like a sheet snapped and lifted, then ripple backward.
A judge inches his pen toward paper, as if closeness could explain anything.
I stand. The jacket tightens then lets go. My body sways like a boat learning my weight.
Step.
Another step.
Walking is something you relearn in public.
Bathroom, I think.
Only word that wins its way to the surface.
Bathroom. Cold water. Door. Lock. Air. Or none.
The hall's noise follows me to the wings and sits obediently at the border, like a trained dog who knows what thresholds are sacred.
An usher lifts his hand, then drops it. No script for reaching into a breakdown and becoming useful.
I heard noise as I left murmurs of confusion and outrage. I stepped out
A stagehand checks a cable that doesn't need checking. Work is shelter when the weather turns.
The side corridor light is older. Yellow. After-hours light. My shoes make the tired sound floors make when they want to be left alone.
A poster of last year's winners lines the wall. Ink smiles all the same. I want to fold myself on the carpet until the world stops being a picture.
Bathroom door. Hydraulic hinge. Push. The soft, damp sigh of closing.
Tile. Pale grout. A mirror with too many bulbs above it. A faucet left barely on. The echo of small water in hard space.
I turn the tap hard. I want noise louder than my head.
Water hits the basin honest and mean. I hold my hands in the stream until my skin hurts, then throw a small river into my face.
Cold slides into my collar. The jacket darkens as it drinks. I let it.
Palms on porcelain. I bend until my nose nearly touches the drain. The water talks. I let it say what I can't.
Breath returns in broken pieces. Like someone handing back the shards of a cup and expecting me to make a cup again.
Don't go, she said. Different year. Same rooftop. Don't leave me all alone.
I close my eyes and the rooftop returns whether I invited it or not. Snow in my hair. Her breath at my throat. The small, bitter truth: sometimes the only thing you can give is staying, and sometimes even that won't count.
I open my eyes. A boy in a wet tux looks back. Mouth undecided. Older because certain bones are showing. Younger because fear does that to faces.
I'm not here for honesty. I'm hunting something survivable. The mirror doesn't sell it.
Behind the wall, the hall settles into the kind of quiet that happens when a noise arrives no one knows where to file. Competitions run on clocks that ignore weather.
Relief, not insult.
Let the world keep time.
I've lost mine.
I shut the tap. The blood in my ears becomes a small machine. I count because counting carves. One two three four. Again. One two three. Softer.
The cold dries on my skin. Cloth surrenders to air. My hands hang empty. I don't trust them with anything right now.
I dried my hands with a paper dispenser and looked myself in the mirror
Ugh... this was terrible... what was everyone gonna say..?
Damn it.....