The alcohol makes me daring; it gives me courage. As it drains the colour from my memories, it draws my fingers toward ivory. But I can never touch it. I know that if I did, the spell would be broken. My hands were not made for black and white, as hers were. They have been stained red.
There was once a time when I too could coax music out of silence and beauty out of cold notes printed on a stark page. But then, in an instant, she was gone. Gone too was the black and white, her colours, replaced instead by colours that seemed too vivid.
It was not her absence that I noticed first, but the presence of colour. Someone placed a rose on the pristine row of black and white keys, the crimson petals intruding into the starkness. They thought it was a fitting tribute. But they intruded colour into what had once been ours. They silenced the melody that we had shared.
Even when the flower was no longer there, I could no longer see in black and white. When I looked down at my own slender white fingers, I could not see the contrasts that she had embodied. Never again would things be as simple as black and white.
For me, the contrast had forever become of life and death. Black and white had been interrupted by too much crimson.