The piano is swathed in the darkness, though his eyes can see all around perfectly.
The house is not quiet - for with their hearing, and his abilty, nothing ever is.
The couples in their rooms go about nightly things, things he tries to block from his mind, as he is a boy that has no wishes to hear any of such loud fantasies and realities.
Instead this boy strolls with no real purpose to the piano, picking up the lid with fingers that hold a pearly glow in the night, and his long, pale, glacial fingers ghost across the keys, though he is more silent than the house.
Breaths that he does is not required to take ricochet through the house - though he assumes to only his ears as the ears of his family are turned to other things.
He slowly presses one finger to a key, a note resounds throughout his ears and hangs in the nightly desolation.
It is so loud though, He almost let out a whine of pain as he crumples his brow and secures his hands over his ears - though the action does not benefit him, the action cannot block the thoughts, the fantasies, the images, the scents, the passion, the love that is constantly surrounding this empty abundance of existence.
It's like light.
And it is agonising.
The blinding light that they bask in happily - how can they stand it? - blissfully unaware while the lost boy trails behind in silence.
He pretends not to mind: the silence suits him, he insists with a small smile that he has perfected over these long years, that he prefers to be alone and always has. He lies, he says he is content with his life, happy even, upon rare occasion. But the truth - this lonely boy knows all too well, is that he has to play such pretends for their sake.
They are happy,
And he is not.
That is all there is.
But he is far too kind, too good, and polite and old fasioned to let his true emotions shine through his small smile; to show the way he really feels.
So he bottles it up, and sets up small smiles, smiles that they believe to be genuine, and locks himself away, with the farce of good natured teasing and solitary being, and at night he emerges, and he sits in darkness, with nothing but piano keys for his own.
He press another key down, trying to drown out everything but pearly white and black and silence and light notes that form the melody of single and eternal life.
Eventually his long fingers move enough that he can play some form of true melody - though it is one that simply echos through the house; soft and sad, drifting across only his ears and not interrupting anyone else's activities, simply reminding him that this is what there is, his family: absent together, his piano, and himself.
But he shuts the lid with a delicay that is another mask - as he wants to slam it down, and run from the house that is never silent - before there is any change, before an ending, a resolve, a respite or a differing anything.
Because the song is lost and it goes unheard, the song holds no importance, and the song will never be finished: it will always remain young, unblemished by time, eternal and unending.
And so will he.
And this he realises, as he stares at his long, pale hands; the hands that create and destroy alike,
Life and Death...
Another set of eternal companions that taunt him when he sits alone at night.