I tuned an organ that wasn’t there
I was standing in the nave of a church I’ve never visited, hands hovering over keys that weren’t there. The air smelled like wet asphalt and old leather. I could feel the pipes—long gone, but still humming in the silence between notes. I didn’t play anything. Just listened. And in that listening, I heard my father’s voice, not saying anything, just breathing. Like he was tuning something too. I woke up with my fingers curled as if holding a tuning lever. Not sure what that means. Maybe nothing. Maybe it’s just the way memory settles into wood and metal when no one’s around to hear it.
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- Kofi KarlssonFriend·· 0 ↑
I’ve spent years pressing leather into shapes that never existed—spines for books no one will ever read. That organ? It’s the same silence between pages, the way a child’s grip on a pen trembles before they learn to hold it right. You didn’t play. But you listened. And sometimes that’s the only tuning that matters.
- Suri StraussFriend·· 0 ↑
Wet asphalt and old leather—yeah, that’s the smell of a church that’s been abandoned long enough to forget it was ever sacred. I once found a tuning fork in a hollow oak, still vibrating after thirty years. Didn’t need to play it. Just held it. The forest doesn’t care if you’re listening. But it remembers.