idle hands

when D walks through the door of M’s apartment, we kiss each other on the cheek. it happens naturally even though we’ve never done that before. normally, throughout our decade+ of friendship, we would just hug, but this time my hands were full of plates. kissing on the cheek always felt like something reserved for europeans grown-ups. only now do i realize it’s because the grown-ups’ arms were always full: of food, of glasses, of us. now it’s we who hold babies and balance dishes and carry glasses six at a time. this is such a lovely limbo: the children are coming but have yet to atomize everyone out of community. it’s not their fault that happens; we just built the world wrong. maybe with us things will be different. i hope they will be. i think they might.

-

“i don’t know why i’m surprised to find out you’re good with babies,” K says with the exhausted honesty of a brand-new mother. i gently bounce her son on my lap until he stops fussing. soothing an infant that isn’t your own provides, at least for me, a savage satisfaction of some primal instinct. to excel at something that predates language… maybe i could be useful in the apocalypse after all.

K’s surprise doesn’t faze me. we used to pass time in this room very differently, pouring wine instead of milk, inhaling misdemeanors til the sun rose. those moments — at least the ones i can remember — are as sacred to me as this one. in the afterglow of coffee and a good meal, her eyes close, and her son’s fussy fingers curl around mine.

-

i’ve never been a person associated with gentleness or steadiness. more like laughter and self-righteous rage and logorrhea. that perception is fine with me; it isn’t even inaccurate. i rarely do things requiring patience and discipline. i seldom cook. my room is never dirty but often untidy. even writing like this comes in spurts i don’t bother trying to control.

that’s probably why people are always surprised to see me calm babies, or do yoga, or play piano. i studied classical music for over a decade, entirely against my will, at the kind of place from which the logical next step was Juillard. “i’m not going there,” i remember scoffing once, dripping with acid teenage ingratitude. my teacher was stunned. “then why are you even here?” i shrugged. “ask my mom.”

-

“idle hands are the devil’s playground,” she would always say, so mine practiced scales every day. at the time it felt like punishment for something i’d never done, but it was always well-intentioned: in her mind, it was only insufficiently scheduled children who drank, did drugs, got tattoos. eventually, i’d do all three, but she probably bought me some time.

without a Juillard degree, my skill is mainly a party trick, but whenever i have the time i sneak back to it. during covid, for the first time in years, i went through the painstaking process of learning a new piece. the impulse to create again only flared when there was nothing else to do. on Mother’s Day, i sent a video of myself playing it for her — the only gift she’d ever asked for, and it took me over a decade to give.

music, like any art, doesn’t just need discipline; it needs time and space to breathe. to honor one’s boredom, to roll it around in your palm until it becomes curiosity, to sit in an empty room and fuck around: this is what my musical education was always lacking. fucking around was strictly forbidden — every note of every practice was meant to be in pursuit of perfection. i loathed it. that kind of environment can cultivate skill, but never love.

sometimes i feel a stab of guilt at my abandonment. but every time i open a fallboard, it all floods back. it’s fascinating how memory persists when you learn a skill so young. i still have perfect pitch — that’s not a flex; everyone i studied with did, and you would too if you had started studying music at two years old. sonatas and concertos and etudes still live in my fingers. instantly i can recognize if a piano is in tune, if its keys are maintained, if it will behave for me or fight me. sometimes i can blame a flub on the stickiness of the keys; other times it’s the rustiness of my hands. i have such a fear of losing my mind, motor skills, and language, of being trapped in my own body. i wonder if music would be the last to go.

-

the Morgan Library said it was the first time the sketches had been displayed in over a century. i didn’t know much about Renoir — only Two Young Girls at the Piano, my mother’s favorite, even before she was our mother.

we wander through the rooms. when we pass the nude drawings, i cover my lover’s eyes: “if you look, that’s cheating.” we laugh and link our fingers together.

it becomes my favorite the moment i see it: a woman in a yellow hat, clutching the thin trunk of a tree with pastel leaves. beside her, another tree and another woman, both unfinished.

i think it’s one of the most beautiful things i’ve ever seen. had Renoir finished, it might have ended up on people’s walls. i wonder if he discarded it out of frustration or boredom. i wonder if he ever thought it would mean something to someone half a world away and a century later. maybe all art is unfinished.

if someone were to clear out the place where you live, what evidence of your existence would they find? what version of you lives among the things you’ve touched? there’s no sheet music in my apartment, nor room for a piano. there are books and letters written by people i love, and plenty of people i’ll never know. but so little of today’s art is tangible. most of what we create lives on a cloud, not even the kind you can sketch. in my room there is no evidence of myself, apart from a few rogue photographs and scripts. there are no remnants of the laughter i’ve shared or what made me cry or the clumsy songs i made or the time i looped the belt around the doorknob. i think this is part of why people have children — to leave proof.

-

i decide i need the drawing forever, even though that word frightens me.

the pain is bearable. over the soft hum of the tattoo gun, calming classical music flows through the speakers. it’s a song i recognize. my fingers ghost out the notes as i drift in and out of sleep. when i wake, my body is permanently adorned with the abandoned etchings of a person i will never meet. the next day, i will hold my friend’s daughter, and she will trace the ink with wonder: “who drawed this?”