semi-automatic | joshler

9. dinner

notes:

hello to the longest chapter so far. it's really long.

comments are very highly appreciated.

Play the song: "It's Just A Lot" by K.Flay.

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There are twenty seven bones in your one hand and wrist. Twenty two of Tyler's bones in his left hand are broken. Still, the hand is a miracle to him. Despite the amount of plates and screws inside, it looks okay, if he can name it like that after several surgeries. It still works, in strange ways; it's like semi-automatic, but works, and it's not completely useless. It just can't do the one thing Tyler wants to do. The one thing, that made him the real Tyler.

He never was a social butterfly, he didn't like it. After school all he was doing was studying and practicing, like a good boy he was. On weekends he would play piano at weddings. Sometimes he managed to perform three times a day. He would run out of one church, jump in the car his mom would be waiting in out front, and rush to the next. He basically had never had any free time, but they payed him much for doing, what he loved, so he didn't complain.

He used to play about five the same classical pieces of music so often, that he could play them all whilst sleeping even right now. He always wore different clothes every other day, clean and colourful, buttoned-up all the way to his neck, shirts with all flower patterns possible. That made him recognizable, and people liked it. He asks himself, if they would still like him, if they saw, how he dresses today; more like to a funeral, than a wedding.

When he wasn't playing at weddings, he would play at malls or restaurants. He would smile and play his Bach or Mozart, or whatever overused pieces of music they asked him to play. Everyone knew him as A little pianist from Cincinnati, and people would always clap when he got done, and say hi to him whenever they saw him. He loved every second of it.

Tyler used to spend much time thinking about what he would be doing in the future, for the next twenty years. Most of the time he imagined himself playing in big arenas or clubs, travelling a lot and sleeping in expensive hotels, cuddled to fluffy towels and blankets, and meeting the most important people in music industry, who would like to make music with him. Everybody would know his name and his face.

He didn't have that bunch of friends, that he could go to parties with, or do a mess in shops. Be never enjoyed parties, and his mom was the one, who bought all of his clothes anyway. At the age of fifteen, he was actually much younger than fifteen.

The couple of "friends" he had were just like him. They were piano or violin boys and girls, who he spent his free time with to practice, practice and practice again. Normal people had real friends. Tyler had music. That was enough for him.

Now he's missing everything. Music keeps haunting him and reminding, that he will never play.

By the time he was forced to stop playing and dreaming, he had quite a bit of money put away. He was saving it to pay for the Summer Music Conservatory in New York, that he had been dreaming about for three years and was finally old enough, at fifteen, to apply to.

His parents said, that if he wanted to go, he had to work for the money, but that was a joke, because his work meant to play, and playing was never the work.

He still has all the money he saved for the conservatory, even more than that, but he didn't go anywhere he wanted that summer. He spent that time in hospitals recovering and coming back to life, and in physical therapy learning to pick up the puzzles from a table.