I first met Tatiana on a cold, snowy evening some dark November night, or maybe it was a December night, I don’t remember exactly...I was at a party that I never should have been invited to in the first place, in some house that was so beautifully decorated but so sterile looking, I wondered if anybody actually lived there...however, there I was and there she was...she was regal and royal with her pretentious sophistication...yet, bubbling beneath was someone with a quirky sense of humor and a level of sarcasm that immediately attracted me...for some reason, probably out of boredom, we struck up a conversation and in some manner found a kindred spirit in each other...we slipped out of the stuffy ballroom with the stuffy people in it, and found a nice quiet porch on the second floor where we looked at the moon and the stars and occasionally babbled about something so insignificant that I can’t remember what it was...at the end of the night, she asked me to call her the next week...I was exuberant but figured it was the vodka talking and that in the morning she would have forgotten our little interaction...she slipped me a piece of paper with a number on it...the next morning I thought I might have dreamed it all, but there it was; the piece of paper with the writing on it that could have maybe passed for some version of Japanese...I deciphered the numbers but I waited for a couple of days because I didn’t want her to think I was desperate to call her (which I was) and part of it was because I didn’t think she would remember me, or to have her think she must have a serious drinking problem to have given her number to somebody like me...or maybe the number wasn’t a real phone number or at least hers anyway and she just did for laughs...so the phone number sat uncalled for a few days while I went back and forth as to whether I should actually try it...I suddenly realized I felt like I was back in high school stressing over whether I should call the cheerleader or not...this struck me as somewhat pathetic, so I picked up the phone and called her...she answered and I said “Hey, it’s me….(silence)….I was going to hang up and then mumbled, “the guy from the party last weekend”...she said “Oh, yes…” in a voice which I wasn’t sure was welcoming me or mocking me...“Took you long enough” she said and off we went speaking as casually and easily as before...as I got to know her I found that she was like a symphony, beautiful, soft, and comforting, and she had money, not that it mattered…well I must admit, that was nice too...she was captivating with beautiful harmony, style, and grace that left me spellbound and wanting more...as the old line goes, we made some beautiful music together at least for a short time...however the longer I got to know her, I found her mood could change quickly and her symphony could also produce loud, harsh and tortured notes; sounds that very quickly became incredibly annoying...maybe that’s why nobody played her for too long as I found out later...I was enchanted with her but I was tired too: I was getting tired of her dramatic interludes...I also realized that she needed a virtuoso to play her deep intricate passages and complicated bridges that swayed in the wind, tortured scherzos and all...she was a complex piece and there were times when I felt my fingers were taped together when I tried to clumsily play her...yes, I thought to myself, she needed a master musician to make her happy and satisfy her demands for perfection, and here I am, some mediocre piano bar player clearly over my head; someone who didn’t know any women beyond three chord rockers that might have been written down on a dirty napkin...eventually, we drifted apart as I knew that we probably would, and that she probably felt the same way as I did...we found some common ground for one brief magical time, but that ground fell away from under our feet and the magic flowed away with it...I think she is probably off somewhere in her mansion living a comfortable life still looking for an accomplished player who could bring out the best in her, while I carve out a day to day existence like some kind of pathetic bar band looking for their next gig...well, it was fun while it lasted.
