My chrome is shining just like an icicle.

I'm tired (and yet not tired--more like wound up and edgy but wanting to go to bed), and so I'll be brief:

There was, in fact, no sun today; the sun shone on us Friday, and since then we've had some serious rain. One newspaper predicted "mountainous seas" in some coastal areas. Just before 2, I skipped off through the rain to get to my recital hall; a few hours later, I stepped in front of my audience, not fully sure of where all my limbs were, or where my eyes should go. One friend who wanted to be in attendance was, instead, home sick, but her gift to me was hanging around my neck and will now, I suspect, become yet another of my talismen. I introduced my piece; everyone thought that I had simply taken it upon myself to do so, when in fact it was my teacher's idea. But everyone who'd come to see me thanked me for having given them a sense of how to hear what I was about to play.

And then I sat down, and then I launched in, and as long as my concentration stayed--as long, say, as there were no small children running near my field of vision--my fingers skipped and flew and trilled and ran, and there was music in the hall, and I was making it. My crew was so excited that when the first movement of my sonata ended, they burst into applause, even though one doesn't do that. And then the second movement was even lovelier, because I was able just to let it come off my fingers and wrap up and around everyone I knew, even the people far and near who couldn't be present.

When I last performed that second movement, in 1988, I played it as a love song, slow and a bit gushy. Today, I played it as a love song again, but this time a slightly swifter one--and in many ways a sadder and a wiser one. I played it to my own playing; a welcome back to and a rejoining with something of myself I didn't remember having had or having been, not like this, not this quietly and happily. And yes, I did also play it for a person not yet here, but that too meant something different to me this afternoon than I'd have imagined it would, even when I woke up this morning. Somewhere futures are shaping themselves. At dinner, my Canadian friend brushed up our knowledge of genetics and eye color, and I thought of eyes and eyelids coming into being.