Arthur often felt he lived in slow motion. Everyone around him always had something to do or someplace to be. When he chose his new house for his retirement, he didn’t expect all of his neighbors to be so high-strung. He found on the first day there that the people clearly had better things to do than stop by or welcome him to the neighborhood. Still, he wished he could be blessed with the ability to be late to something really important. He thought it would be nice to have a full schedule or a long week ahead of him. He lived in the center of his town. He was the eye to his town’s hurricane. While in other houses you could hear, screaming, or laughing, or crying, there were very little signs of life from Arthur’s house. Not even with a grand piano taking up a fourth of his living room. He figured since he had played that all his life, it would be nice to get some new hobbies. He had been playing ever since he can remember. He felt like the only thing that defined him was his skills at the piano. So it just sat there for months, ignored while Arthur tried out knitting, and photography, and Shakespeare. But all of those felt like chores for him. And he felt his piano staring him in the face while he started new activities he knew he wouldn’t really enjoy.

Eventually without doing a single thing, the piano wore Arthur down. He woke up one morning and felt the most incomplete he had ever felt. Playing felt as necessary to him as eating or sleeping. He came downstairs and sat down on the bench. Somehow that bench felt more comfortable then his bed. He sat there for a second, thinking about all the times in his life he was in this exact position. The perfect balance of focus and relaxation, of anticipation and fulfillment. The dead silence of expectation. He pressed the first note. The sound was quiet, yet it still scared the silence away. It sung in Arthur’s ears, ringing in his brain. The second note resonated throughout Arthur’s entire body. The third note filled his soul with nostalgia and joy. When he played the chord together, it sounded like it exploded out of the piano, filling every corner of his house. Then he started playing a song. His movements were second nature. He didn’t have to think about what notes to play. He wasn’t really thinking about anything. His train of thought had been hijacked by the music. He was at the complete mercy of the notes. The sound surrounded him, burst through the walls of his house, and echoed through his fast moving neighborhood. And all of his neighbors on their way to work, and on their phones heard the music, and stopped. And in that moment, the quick heartbeat of the town slowed down, the music chased out all of the stress of daily life, and for a minute, Arthur wasn’t bored, his neighbors weren’t busy, everyone just was at peace.