I used to have a piano that was light brown. It’s wood was worn and cracked and the seat squeaked as you sat down. It was next to the kitchen in the house I grew up in. I would get home from school, hang my backpack above the shoes and run to the piano. My mother would cook dinner in the kitchen and she would tell me songs she wanted me to play. I quit piano lessons a long time ago so I would do it by ear, testing out different chords to create a melody out of thin air. A few years later, my dad said he would get me a new piano. The neighborhood two doors down had a piano for sale and we tested it out. This one was shiny, reddish brown, and the Keys were a bright ivory color with no cracks. We brought it home in a trailer and put it right where the old one used to be. It sounded clearer and the melodies hit the air streaming colors of sound like a ribbon falling from the sky. We stayed in that house till I was seventeen and then we moved. Only a mile away, I we built a house and I watched it grow from a hole in the ground to a place that my family called our new home. We brought the redish brown shiny piano with of us, putting it right by the kitchen once again. This time, there was no wall between me and the rest of the house. Little privacy so we decided to move it to the office. Now I had my own room, this one carpeted and closed off from the rest of the house. I had my own place to create. To sculpt sounds and to sing my feelings out. It came the time for college. Studying musical theatre, I new I would find a piano but what would it look like? How would it sound? Would it be like my first one, light brown, sounding like a gentle old woman whose voice is soft as whispers and peaceful as snow. Or would it be red and shiny just like my one at home? Would it cut through the air in waves or pierce the silence like fire?

First week of classes I found myself in the hallway of practice rooms. Thriteen rooms, 3 grand pianos, ten vertical pianos. I found one with a window, the sun hitting the Keys at middle c, shining a warm lit glow throughout the room. I opened the door, it creaked and the tile floor was dusty. I pulled out the black painted bench and hit a D7 chord. Music filled the room and I wondered what my mother was doing at home. Was she in the kitchen, missing me playing in the office? I heard a trumpet sound from across the hall. It was faint and dulled because of the sound barriers. How cool is it that everyone in this hallways shares the same passion!

I didn’t always pick the same room. Over time I found my favorite room to vocalize in, favorite room to talk with friends in, and a room that I liked to be alone in. It had a blue carpeted bench in it that sat next to a mirror. Before a performance I would sit there, applying some last minute lipstick before hitting the stage. One night, I was feeling overwhelmed and went to the room I liked to be alone in. I didn’t talk to the piano, it talked to me. It never asked me to open up, I just did. My fingers would float across the keys and my voice would carry different sorrows, joys, tears, and love. I had nights where I broke down on the keys, forcefully pushing chords down, my voice shaky and angry, other days I would sing a worship song as the sun filled the room. Each piano has seen me in a different light. The first room to my right in the hallway was where my friend Myles and Lucia performed for each other for the first time. The last room is where I sat and listened to my friend as he played me his original songs. Each room started to fill up with memories, they are still stuck in my head like a song that won’t get out.