Emotions always take a different path when you allow yourself to change direction.

my hands

stride across the piano keys

with a weary soul

a camera

in the corner of the room

like a silent man

watching

his mind full of judgment

four people

and one soul

breathing

inside the music of silent night

perhaps what keeps us

so still

are the eyes and ears

of that cold machine—

it looks,

only at me,

as if it knows

I might

flirt, criticize,

or think something wrong

I’m choking

beneath its gaze

I ask myself

should I stay

I did nothing

I swear by my conscience

by the thin border

between man and woman

by the purity of sound

yet I still drown

under that watching eye

I grow so silent

I can hear

dust rolling

on the piano keys

in the stillness

my intuition touches

hopelessness—

for I cannot know

what others want

I wander

through the notes — Sol, La, La, Sol, Mi —

like a child

sliding down a wooden bridge

each sound ringing

my heart falls

too quickly

and when the final beat fades

I still don’t know

if I am learning to play

or learning how

to breathe

beneath the eyes that see.

Perhaps such prejudice wouldn’t exist if I were in Europe.

But here I am — an Asian woman being taught piano by a male instructor.

I don’t know whether he has a girlfriend or not, but he always looks at me with his soul.

He always arrives early to listen to me play.

I feel suffocated.

I don’t know whether I’m practicing piano, or practicing the rhythm of love — learning to feel what love sounds like.

He always looks at me, and that camera in the corner makes it feel as if we are having an affair.

I don’t dare look straight into his eyes. I always keep my head down, to reflect, to listen carefully to what he is trying to describe. I don’t think I can continue studying like this.

Yet I feel he is truly dedicated to his work, always waiting until I play correctly before letting me go, even if it’s fifteen minutes past the fixed lesson time. But I still wonder — why is it *they* who message me every day to confirm the lesson, and not him?

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Perhaps I feel this will be a sweet little journey for my teacher. I wrote this story over the course of two weeks, and all the events described are completely true. Everything is ultimately just an illusion when thousands of relationships sprout from our senses, especially between men and women. A teacher is still a teacher—whether you like it or not, they can be persistent; even if there’s nothing there, they might still flirt. As long as students are interested—whatever that feeling might be, as long as it can be called love in some sense—they will show up to class diligently. I don’t really know much and haven’t received confirmation from anyone, but what made me step back from my assumptions was reading about the instructors in the piano group. Perhaps, whether my guesses are right or wrong, it’s better to step back and search for my own true value instead of speculating blindly, only to realize that everything is temporary and its worth keeps shifting. Perhaps I should title this piece “Stepping Back to Embrace My Own Value” rather than waiting for others, predicting them, or trying to manipulate their thoughts. Throughout the process of writing this, I’ve shifted my mindset—from a passive, suffocating way of thinking to one that simply recognizes that everything before was just branching emotions arising when people confront problems. I didn’t tell my mind that these were just thoughts and not reality. Through some catalytic moment, I realized I could feel them, and I asked myself why they had this mechanism of shaping emotions and thoughts in such a way. How could I sidestep them? How could I recognize them? And most importantly, how could I allow myself to truly feel at ease, rather than forcing my mind to dwell on what I wanted it to?

__SofTV_