Seventeen.

As a young girl, I once wrote a song.

It was a song that was written with a friend, so naturally, it was a duet. Our song had no words; it was just casually pounded out on the black and white keys of my 1910 Steinway with our short, clumsy fingers. We laughed and proclaimed parts of the song as pieces of the scenery.

“This is the leaves outside the house,” my friend mused, playing a quick, repetitive melody.

“Then this is the sound of the wind, moving the leaves!” I countered, excited that I had won that insignificant bout that transpired between no one but myself.

And so we laughed and laughed and kept gliding our fingers over the keys as if we were experts, when in reality, the fingers of toddlers couldn’t have reached the keys to execute the graceful song that chimed in our heads.

After approximately twenty minutes of our disastrous music playing, the melody stopped chiming. Satisfied, we sat on the floor to hum our quaint song while silently assessing our creation.

“Why didn’t we ever play the sky’s song?” my friend questioned with a slight tinge of disappointment.

“Why didn’t we ever play the sea’s song?” I asked out loud, although the answer wasn’t available for either of us.

We were only seven and nine, so the real answer never appeared before us, no matter how hard we pondered those grand questions. So using the naivety that could only be found in such young children, we answered the question as if it was much more obvious than the sky being blue or that candy is sweet.

“I think we never played their songs because it would take forever,” my friend exclaimed, exasperated from all the thinking.

But my little mind kept thinking about the despair I would feel if I was left out of a song simply because I was too big and there was no room for me to be squeezed in. Why couldn’t the sky play with the ocean and the leaves in harmony? I frankly thought that was unfair and I kept thinking and thinking about how to remedy the situation.

“If it takes forever to play their songs, we’ll just keep playing them forever then. Sometimes, we’ll play it out loud, but most of the time, we’ll play it in our heads,” I finally said after much contemplation.

Excited, we celebrated our triumph over a high hurdle with ice cream and caramel. There’s a special place in my heart for ice cream and caramel, but I’m almost fairly certain now that my friend hated sweets. My friend ate it with me anyways.

Then we delegated the songs, I got the sea and my friend got the sky. Finally, we pinky sweared and thumb stamped that their songs would be on autoplay for the rest of our lives.

As we transformed from toddlers to teenagers, as our landscapes morphed from cold winters to no winters, the songs gradually changed as well. The sky’s song changed from twinkling autumns, played on the right side of the piano to bland, tasteless autumns that were suppressed by a blanket of deep notes. The ocean’s song lightened and heated from frigid, icy notes that bellowed many scales lower. These were natural changes as our houses grew feet and sat down in different places.

But the sky’s song kept morphing into something darker and darker, travelling down the left until there were no longer any keys that could wail so deep.

And eventually, the sky’s song just disappeared and the ocean’s melody kept feebly whistling on its own. For a while, the ocean kept playing the same key over and over because it didn’t know how to accept the loss of something just as big as itself.

And the ocean tried to comfort itself by replacing the sky with other things, but nothing could mimic the colossal presence that was once the sky’s. Nothing could replace the pit left behind when the sky performed its great vanishing act.

Now that I’m seventeen and it’s been almost four years since my sky left, I thought I would have figured out how to fill in the hole by now. But the truth is, I haven’t. I haven’t learned how to play the sky’s part. I haven’t found anyone who could play the sky’s part. I haven’t done anything but play the same couple of notes for the last four years.

But this story isn’t about me having an epiphany and moving on.

It’s about my lack of a duet partner. It’s about the 1910 Steinway in the living room that has eighty eight working keys, but only chooses to play four.

I’ve never said it out loud, but the truth is, I miss him. And this is my cowardly way of finally admitting it. But maybe one day, I’ll figure out what to do with my skyless days.