POLLUTING

The leaves had made their way inside and it must be autumn. At first they struck her by surprise for they resembled splashes of blood on the cement floor, but on second glance she realized they were just leaves, brick-red leaves laying peacefully, a subtle sign of the cherry-colored season. 

She played the more antiquated piano with the discolored keys in the practice room. There was a much newer, nicer piano in the same room, but she wanted the sour notes and the inharmony. She wanted all the wear and tear, the crack and the choke in the melody, and she wanted the piano to cry. She wanted some keys to die under her fingertips and not be able to rise again, and to hear the dull, echoing vibration involuntarily accompanying. Cries are not flowing kind of things...

Except it wasn't as insightful as it seems now. She chose to sit in front of that piano because it had a prettier looking chair in front of it. Unfortunately, shallowness seems to find itself everywhere in this world, but the story is not over yet. The piano was indeed jarring and the peeling wooden keys stung her fingers, and so she quit the poetic sensations of the obsolete piano and instead wrote a passage about it. The wounded keys were kind of beautiful in a broken kind of way though, and the sound was too, but perhaps too hollow for her rich soul, or too rich for her hollow soul. 

That's just the way she was - possessing opposites in the same time, all the time. Everything is pretty, and everything is ugly. 

* * *

She attended a book reading in a little bookstore practically mounted by stacks of books. It was located on the second floor, and she walked up a creaky little staircase along the trails of scattered books in order to sit next to some elderly man who nearly half-squeezed her off her seat. He had these big squarish glasses on and was scribbling in a notebook before the reading had started, and she noticed that he had pretty handwriting. 

The author was standing in front of a light source reading excerpts from his book. He had a white dress shirt on and an untamed kind of face. She had to concentrate a bit to comprehend the accent in his voice, but she enjoyed letting the words blur into a nice rhythm in the background while she pondered everything else about him. He took a sip of red wine in the gaps between page turns, and as he exhaled she could smell the traces of the lingering wine making its way to the front rows. She imagined how she would compose his portrait if she had her camera with her. Half of his face would dissolve into the white light shining against him, so it would probably be a profile. He had a very pretty nose. 

He had a very pretty voice as well, and she was certain of that during her several attempts to fall back into his words. The things he wrote about, kind of witty, kind of dry, and kind of remorse. He wrote about wandering in the streets, feeling useless, delusional, and realizing his infertility when posed against beautiful scenery. Then she assumed that, he must be one of those guys. Where everything could be just plainly vacuous but having the sort of simple beauty in it. It's as if nothing mattered and the walls were pretty just being white alone.

Then she imagined what it would be like falling in love with him. How they would walk together on the beautiful streets of Paris, meditating on values that will never be brought into play, and how maybe they'd spend days inside a room, feeling sluggish and vibrant simultaneously. Yes, she supposed it would be kind of romantic being in love with a writer, a writer with a pretty nose, but... 

She dropped her thoughts again as he came to an ending and quietly declared that he had the perfect amount of moisture and cohesion in his voice. Then there was a thank you and an applause and she stood up, finally clawing away from the old man, and folded her metal chair. She made her way through the curbs of books and people, down the rusty wooden steps, and not once did she turn back to look at this writer she could have loved.