everything about you affirms.  the music you play affirms for the rest of us that, yes, it can be played.  and hearing you play it affirms that, yes, it can be beautiful. 

you affirm, with your eyes alone, brimming with life and gratitude, that a god lives within everyone should we choose to engage it, discover it, open ourselves to it.  

(this, incidentally, is a relationship we can have with modern music, too.)

the instant your recital finished in the basement of cornelia, i said the words “oh my god.”  you’ll hear it on the recording since i sat right by the camcorder.  but there was nothing else to say.

and then, a few minutes later, when instead of an encore you went back onstage to first thank margaret, a legend, sitting behind me (i was starstruck), and then me — me? — i had to say those words again. 

i keep telling myself, and then telling myself to stop telling myself, that you’ve made some mistake by believing in me.  that i should correct you, shake some sense into you.  confess.  but in two weeks you’ve dared to know me better than i(‘ve ever dared to) know myself, to recognize that god in me which i can’t acknowledge. 

the night before your concert, i had a rather practical incentive come to me before falling asleep; i figured i could finish my major creative projects in maybe one or two years, and then — and only then — promptly commit suicide.  that, i figured, might actually motivate me to complete them.  

and then, less than 24 hours later, i found myself skipping from your recital through the rain up the center of cornelia street, then across west fourth, and then up hudson into chelsea.  the city steamed around me.  life…  i could’ve combusted with joy, eager to create and do the impossible.  to play.  to share.  to not die.  

you did that.  reminded me that, as pianists, impossible is what we do for a living.  that i’m lucky.

everything about you affirms.

—12:04 a.m., 8/23/11, on an airplane somewhere over vermont