December 21, 2021
Robots play piano well, but they never get past a certain level. My teacher Monica said I played with my whole soul. Some people don’t have a soul, she said.
That day Monica started wearing her sleek, black wig, was the same one she told me about her early boyfriends and Sunny’s Sundaes in Delphi, Indiana.
That was when I understood she had a robot of herself as a young woman; it reminded her she’d once been healthy and beautiful; on good days, it convinced her she still was. She pretended she did not have this robot, and never brought her to lessons.
The robot reminded Monica how full of life she had been, but it couldn’t like things, could only learn them. It didn’t understand the difference between Bach and Brahms, why Bach made Monica focus and Brahms filled her with longing.
Source: Yale Literary Magazine
