All Things Become Clear.

I love my teacher's new piano. It's a stunning golden-brown Steinway Model A with crystalline tonality and incredibly sensitive reaction. Playing on that instrument, a musician can lay bare the foundations of a work, and build the colour up from the core of the sound. The hammers on the strings ring out bell-like, pellucid; there are no layers of sonic varnish to distort the pristine notes. It's his third piano since I started there in the ninth grade, and even though the first one may technically have been the highest-quality specimen, my heart belongs completely to this new companion.

My teacher has been warming to it too. Tonight at my playthrough (audience of three, Jenna included), he pointed out the characteristics I have mentioned. His friend, probably a musician himself, agreed.

"It's a beautiful piano. And you -- (looks at me) -- belong there."

Gyahhh.

Does he know -- he can't know -- how long it's been since I felt sure of that? Does he sense, perhaps, how uncertain I've become of my place lately? Witness this speedwritten notebook excerpt, from just three days ago:

it sits
before me a great landscape of sound
silver beams of light drawn into eternity
and I watch the clatter of the
mountains rising, falling back,
white waves in the great black ocean.
An arm reaches toward the ceiling;
my hands are timid, uncertain.

I am not yet ready
to fly atop this darkling spirit.
I trip and stumble through the paces
up and down the monochrome path;
the notes false, still,
after so much bloodshed.

Now, though, I can regain lost confidence. And I can devote myself to being whatever I am...not for any practical purpose, but only out of love -- pure and unadulterated as the sound of the piano itself -- for the beauty at the heart of all things. That is where I belong.

but there will come a day
when together I and the beast
spread wings, lift,
and teach ourselves to trace
glorious radiant patterns through the stars.
On that day and after,
the universe belongs not to us,
but to those who look and dream
and listen.

There will be more and more for all of us.