The piano that ate the key.

She panicked.

In a fluid moment of poetry and slapstick comedy, the one and only key to the grand piano that stood for ages, aloof and lonely in that dark auditorium, slipped out of the key hole, slided down the shiny ebony lid and disappeared through the yawning slit widening as the slippery inkblack keyboard cover shut. It disappeared into its dark abdomen, shocked into silence by the unfortunate turn of events that it could not foresee coming. Nothing save a muted "clink" was heard as it landed somewhere on the floor of its obsidian cavity, along with the muffled thud as the cover closed and the slit slided shut.

"No...!"

Don't panic, she tells herself. The silent audience of the empty auditorium drew in a sharp, soundless breath in frightened anticipation - the deed was done.

Denial reverberated across the walls... she realises that she is alone. Nobody will know as long as I can somehow slide my hand deep enough - ungh, oof - through this slit.... as long as I can keep the lid half-opened ... ouch - the hand in a selfless act of heroism strained tight against the lips that with any slight miscalculation threatened to disembody it.

The fingertips felt nothing but dust. She gave up.

The half-lit stage oozed a brooding sense of danger - the kind that shrouded Sir Gawain the Green Knight every time he entered brooding forests on the errands of his King.

Now she is in for it. She had specific instructions, from the Principal, no less, who had kept the key to the grand piano in his personal key box for safe-keeping that afternoon, and now the nefarious thing has swallowed it!

At 9pm, brainjuice calls Mr Chong, the jaga who laughingly promised her before she fled the scene of the crime that he will dismantle the grand piano and find the key. Sure enough, as he unscrewed the lips of this monster from the dark, what he found was intriguing: along with a hammer, a $50 note and a washing machine, was a shiny, innocuous, baroque styled little piano key.

You.

The pronoun of intimacy. It indicates relationship, signals closeness, suggests at the position the dominant "other" has in one's heart and life. It's "you" as opposed to just "him", or "her" or "they" - its "you" as in "you and I" .... the whole concert of "us"-dom.

For brainjuice, "You" are that elusive memory, the unclosed chapter, the perpetual protaganist, the demons in her mind, the God she seeks to know. "You" are more real, more palpable sometimes than the day she lives through.

"You" are who she silently converses with - the dramatic monologues in which she thrashes out unresolved issues and rehearses the conversations that never happened. "You" are no more than figment of her imagination - a mere player in her self-directed play, where the constructs of reality are played out according to her whims and fancies - she, the ultimate despot, "you" the hapless audience.

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"You". After work, I'd pop by Crystal Jade at Holland V to get dinner for you. On some evenings, you'll meet it with a weak smile and wan hug. On other evenings, I am nothing more than the "wife" doing the obligatory thing. We'd eat. You'd listen to my misadventures, and on good days you will laugh a little at how silly I am. You'd return to the television, or the game on your computer, or Final Fantasy on the playstation. I'd mark, or do some reading.

At some point in the evening things go downhill - I press the point about how stagnant the relationship has been for the last 2? ... 3 years? It always starts when you talk about the other women in your life - some are colleagues, some friends, some are nameless characters that drift into your circle of clubbers and fellow cell-group mates at work.

They always sounded as though they were somehow more colourful and interesting than me - the jobs they held, their intellectual jokes, the weekend getaways to the Turf club to gamble on horses. You didn't seem to understand how that made me feel. You couldn't make the connection that in my schema of inter-related things all these didn't bode well for me at all - you call my worries stilted and unfounded, say that I'm increasingly paranoid and bitchy, you compare me to the first time we met in London when I was so much more self-assured and confident, and most importantly "sweet", and lament that I've just somehow "declined".

I will inadvertantly leave near midnight for home. Hurt, although after a while it became a kind of biting numbness. A silent shrug of resignation, a short sigh delivering a prayer upward that is soundless, wordless, even if loaded with desire.

The protracted arguments continue when I reach home over the telephone - do you remember them? With you, I'm a bumbling idiot who cannot string a single coherent sentence together, not to mention a single argument. We fight over semantics, the things we apparently said or intoned that came out the wrong way, the frustrations in your family that were never fully relevant to us.

"A-, I'm just too tired to talk now - it's 2 in the morning and I need to get up in three hours."

I'd take to writing long protracted emails - it was only in writing that I could practise absolute despotism over you without your constant interruptions of protest. Of course they never actually helped, unless you considered fanning your anger helping.

You are the demon in that unclosed chapter, even though now we are friends.
Forgiveness has been granted. That's a none-issue now - if anything I am proud that you've regained footing with yourself - and more importantly with the Lord.

You are a distant memory. You are fading fast now. No more tears will flow on your account.
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"You". You are the love of my life. You are the man I remind myself every morning as I slip on the ring I am going to marry in a little less than 7 months time. On some mornings, I will smile a little to myself recalling the moment on the Tioman beach when on one knee you slipped the innocuous thing on my finger before I could say anything.

But of course I was going to say "Yes" anyway. How can I not?

You are the salve on my sores, the sms I get every morning. I hear your voice in the text "Good morning, sweetie! Have a great day, and I will see you tonight!" and the uphill tasks that confront me in the day don't look quite so uphill anymore.

You are the hug and the countless kisses I get for just being me - no need to prove my worth in wit, no need to put up a performance for evaluation, no work review. You are my perfomance bonus to the power of infinity.........................

No need for words.

But words are all I have, my love. Do you know me? Do you really? Two people whose lives will soon be bound together in marriage, two porcupines on a cold night, yearning for each other's warmth but inexorably kept at arms length by our quills... our differences.

How shall we meet the bumps ahead in our lives? Brush them aside, sweep them under the carpet and watch TV?

You say I think too much. Yes, I shall readily admit to that, as a creature of intuition my instincts are to project current trends and be our weather forecaster. Was it not Francis Bacon who said

"Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man."?

This life we're living - what is it worth if it's not for working out all these questions we have about the doubts we entertain?

Allow me to connect with you. Help me to connect with you. Pick my brain because I am more than just the girlfriend, more than just the good wife, more than the child-bearing hips, the mother-to-be. Pick my brain so that when our eyes meet, we know what we have is a marriage of equals, divinely arranged to help each other be sanctified daily in our daily struggle to get closer to God.

When I look into your eyes tonight, I'd recognise you.

Perhaps I always have - "It's you!"

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And finally, "You". The "you" that I have known was always there, even as a child. I saw "you" in the sunlight filtering through the trees. You were there looking down on me, when I was 6 years old, as I pompously circled the lost ant with my finger in an experiment of childish despotism and omnipresence. And then I realised what an ant I was to you too.

"You" were there when the questions about what is good and evil came - you started knocking as I sat through evening Mass, and later I answered the door of my heart and invited you in because I felt that no one in the whole wide world loved me the way you did.

The way you still do. This week, as I approach the 12th Easter in my life, help me remember that you have purchased me with Your blood. My life is not my own to live, help me live it the way You desire me to.

Amen.