Beautiful Room

Ethan Haymes

This room is beautiful. Just a desk and a piano. The piano, the one you got when you were eight years old in Fort Worth, Texas, looks like is was finished on the factory floor yesterday and that it has never played a single note. Unwrapped for the first time in this pristine home. Outside, there is so much everything, and so much nothing that the silence is deafening.

The desk has been used well. It has seen many years of thinking, writing, and calling while telephones were still associated with the furniture they were placed on and not free to float around in midair and travel hundreds of miles from their nests. The desk sends its energy out in straight lines. Cosmic Rays. It sends microscopic decisions, plans, and deadlines that jet directly to their intended targets while passing through walls, flesh, and earth without leaving a mark. It is the core of the cheesy looking star atop the sign for the Astro Motel or the Cosmic Inn. There is function here, joy here, there is pleasure and even delight, but not "beauty," not its own beauty? No sex?

The piano's energy pulses out in rings, sound wave shaped disturbances of the perfect environment. These shapes take on their full color when it is played. This complex instrument responds to human touch and gives something back. You can use a piano to kiss someone. Before karaoke, one had to be able to harness the sounds of one of these vessels As well as produce sound waves through the instrument of the body to attract mates (). In short, you can kiss someone with the sounds of the piano. A kiss is still a kiss. You cannot kiss someone with a desk. You can sit at the desk and he or she may kiss you, but you were loved and desired by this person before you sat down. At the piano, if you are skilled, you can seduce the most austere sensible being into rapture. Music is what can lift our crude perceptions high enough to feel the breath of god.

These energies, the circular lascivious ripples of one and the unashamedly direct lines of the other, both are the strongest in the direction of the user whether he is at his post or not. This is the one thing these two have in common. The way that they are positioned, both facing generally toward, but not right at, the very center of the circular design expertly woven into the rectangular carpet,  makes them harmonious. If both of these powerful beings were made to stare directly at the center of that circle, equidistant at 90 degrees, the center would be a physically uncomfortable place to stand, and would summon you to stand at it all the same. It would dare you to tempt the power of its existence, and see if you could escape with a sound mind. This would turn this pleasant den into a torture chamber.

Piano. Rug. Desk. We have now arranged them perfectly and it was worth the extra time and thought. You narrowly avoided a very unpleasant thing by trusting me to help you set this room up.