Piano: my lost love.

I used to love playing saxophone.  I loved to knit.  I took up guitar for a short time, and enjoyed that too.  But, most of all, I used to love playing piano.

While I wasn't the most dedicated piano student, I always loved playing.  The  majority of the time, it was a chore to practice - something Mom would make each of us do before we got to play, or before we got to use the computer.  So we would sit at the piano, staring out the big front windows of our house on Pecan Street, wishing that we were outside rollerblading with all the neighbor kids.

But for being a chore, I grew to love it very much.  Only when I stopped having to play in competitions did I realize how enjoyable it could be.  For the last five years, my piano playing has been extremely rare, save for the one semester I had piano lessons for an undergrad music requirement.

Last night, however, I played for several hours.  Oh how I've missed the feeling of the keys beneath my fingers, beautiful sounds filling the air (though not quite as beautiful as they once were..).  It was my emotional outlet, and I didn't even realize it.  Last night I searched through my mom's music library and found some of the old pieces I played in high school.  When I began to play them, muscle memory kicked in, and I was amazed at how much I remembered - It was a central part of who I was back then, and I just discovered it's still there, deep down somewhere.  The love for playing music did not disappear when I lost access to a piano, it was merely suppressed.


I kept playing and playing until the wee hours of the morning, letting out all of these feelings, so many thoughts that I've pushed down for so long came out in music.  It used to be a way that I processed things, the way that I coped with the incredible stress of my high school years (years which were even busier and crazier than my time in college, if that's even possible).

"You don't know what you've got til it's gone" is so true in this case.
If only I had access to a piano now in Chicago... I guarantee I would be happier, more at ease, and more content, simply because I would have the outlet to think through the hard things and release emotions that I cannot express in words.  Sigh.  Someday I will have a piano again - someday. :)