When I was two years old, my parents took me to Hong Kong and while we were there, my dad ordered a Yamaha piano. I don’t know what gave him the idea to do this. Clearly he wanted me to learn the piano. I remember taking piano lessons and learning these really basic and boring songs. I learned the notes, but since then, I have totally forgotten them. Throughout the years, I would have this urge to teach myself to play, but I just never got around to it. I hated practicing songs I didn’t like. I wanted to make up songs, not recite them. Sometimes when no one is home, I get on the piano with Prince and we make up stuff on there. I don’t know the notes, but I memorize the melodies.
I find it totally funny now to learn that as a kid, Prince fired his piano teacher because she didn’t let him play what he wanted. Instead, he went on to learn to play by himself. This began many of his self-taught abilities. It’s funny to see our lives in parallel to each other as twin souls. Prince was much stronger than me in that he never let people put him down.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to play guitar. And I did. I think I learned one song. And then I went on to write this one song. I remember it going like this:
Good night, farewell
Take care and be well
We’ll meet again
On another planet
Somewhere far way
How it is that I still remember these lyrics is just beyond me. I didn’t know what I was writing about at the time, but the words felt real to me. But I look back on it now and I really believe that I was singing it to my twin soul about having to be apart.
I used to write a lot of poetry as a teenager. They would just come through me like water rushing in from the sea to shore. And I would capture them. I even gathered all my poems together and printed them in a little book titled The Lavender Room. It was printed on purple paper with a silver cover. But later I become discouraged and stopped writing when I took a writing class in high school. I didn’t enjoy the class very much when it became clear to me that the teacher didn’t have much appreciation for what I was writing. Maybe he thought my ideas were too far fetched. I remember writing a short story about a man living on the Eiffel Tower. It’s really funny to me now, because I recently learned that there is a secret apartment inside the Eiffel Tower.
Image above: “Playing Piano” by Prince in spirit.
©2016. Andrea Mai. All rights reserved.
