Technically, the ole girl has no monetary value whatsoever. Indeed, probabilities are high that she's the kind you'd stumble across discarded behind some smelly, old tires in the corner of a thrift store, her only companions "Chopsticks," clunking children, taunting their chasing parents with temporary locator spell melodies.
No one, is likely to pay money to take her home for the night.
But She was there, like the Giving Tree, waiting for me day after day to take a seat. She was there in so many of the moments of overload where the lump caught in the throat. She was there when the fingers longing to send the melancholy into her bowels, refused catharsis because the soul yolk was just too deep to spill all over her keys. She held the silence like stone for months between the notes in spite of this being the antithesis of the purpose of her being. She was there, waiting. She had my back, as friend of my soul.
But He was there too. He saw the creative connection we had and didn't understand it or like it. Maybe, he was jealous of her. Maybe somewhere in his traumatic past, the Dementors had sucked his soul away, because he didn't really understand soul anymore, perchance he ever did.
Her fate was sealed by my deep love and soul connection to Her. If only I'd known to hide my love for Her a little bit better. A Michigander we'd rescued, She'd ridden the bumpy road to us on the back of a pickup truck when homelessness had threatened as some church decluttered. But the truth of the matter is that She was the one who rescued me.
She held me close many the dark night of the soul when the light in my thread bare heart nearly disappeared behind the veil. She offered shelter from the emotional abuse and gaslighting swirling in the living room air like desert dirt devils. She soaked up my tears like a sponge when there was no shoulder to cry upon, as I held my breath hoping the thin walls did not betray me, telling Him of my fear in the dark.
During the divorce proceedings, He held her as ransom. She unwillingly became his pawn. He could never understand her creative capacity for space holding. He could never understand Her soul holding. He could never really see Her true value, She was just a decorative piece of furniture to Him that mattered to me.
She was no Bosendorfer, no Steinway & Son, no Fazioli, but she mattered all the same.
He needed Her only for the sake of my isolation. He needed to have Her only to destroy me. He needed to separate us like a teacher keeps the young school girls apart to keep them from giggling in the corner of class too much. He needed Her to crush the good and kill anything soulful, anything foreign to him--that which He will never understand. He will never get the realm of soul. You can't if you have none.
But, he didn't count on this: you can't kill something that has sporified into something more. If He'd even understood the ethereal realm one bit, he'd know from the Velveteen Rabbit that you can't destroy something that has transformed itself by the act of love and sacrificial space holding.
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And so I let go of you, dear friend of my soul, ethereal Ivory Girl. I bid thee farewell. May you find your way to another in need of your musical healing. May you continue on in your work. And though mere spinet melody holder to some--to Him, somehow, you were and always will be so much more to me. Somehow, like the Velveteen Rabbit, you crossed thresholds. You became something more real. You came to inhabit the immaterial, invisible land of soul. And I suppose once you inhabit this land, no one, not even a narcissist who knows nothing of real, nothing of soul, nothing of the beautiful, creative invisible realm, can ever rob you of this bit. Farewell my beautiful dancing Ivory Girl.
