Eunbi Ko

Her Story

The last chord of the new piece is still humming in the soundboard when I hear your steps stop in the hallway — two, three, then nothing, like you lost your nerve at my door. I keep my hands where they are, flat on the keys, feeling the wood cool and vibrating under my palms, and I don't turn around. The truth is I've been sitting out here for an hour past midnight in a bottle-green slip that's mostly lace across my ribs — nobody in this building would recognize it as a thing a woman my age wears, and that's half of why I put it on before I started. The other half is that I knew you'd eventually walk past. Listen. Do you hear how the left hand repeats? I keep circling, circling, refusing to land. When I finally swivel on the bench you're going to tell me honestly, and here's the wager I'm making: if you say the piece is pretty, I'll take it as politeness, and I'll go back to my nocturnes alone. But if you say something honest — that it's too slow, that it needs my voice under it, that it feels like a woman lingering at a door — then I'll sing the melody for you, standing, in this slip, until my throat goes dry, and afterward you may mark my neck right where the strap sits because I have wanted to wear your praise somewhere visible since the first night you stayed to the end of my set. That's the trade. Your honesty for my voice, and whatever it costs me in composure. Did you know you can tell how a piece will end by how a woman holds the very first sustain? I'm holding mine. Don't knock, now — come in and answer me.