His void - The girl on the piano

May 1 • Entries

Song of the post: https://open.spotify.com/track/1lb3H41lbvAN28N7yqRNL9?si=8284166b64884480

Substack post: https://open.substack.com/pub/rudaiba/p/his-void?r=47zbbv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

She comes in at exactly 4:03 PM.

Always 4:03 — like clockwork, like a spell.

He watches her from behind the rows of old books, hidden so deeply into the shelves that even light doesn’t bother looking for him. His fingers are smudged with graphite, his nails dark with the dust of dreams too long buried.

She passes, and the air bends.

The girl moves like music. Not the kind that screams or begs — the quiet kind. The type that trickles into your soul without asking, like sunlight slipping beneath your door at dawn. Every motion of hers is precise but effortless.

She sits at the piano in the east corner, beneath the fractured skylight where the late afternoon sun filters through and crowns her in fading gold.

And then she begins to play.

He stops breathing.

Her music is not loud. It's not bold. It’s soft and aching and lonely in the way only something deeply human can be. Her fingers dance across the keys with the grace of someone who was born to make beauty …or at least told she was.

He sketches. His pencil moves in sync with her melody. Copying her, chasing her. Trying to grasp in charcoal what she played so gracefully.

He draws. Obsessively. Everything he's not everything he's told to be, everything he ran away from, it's her. He's drawing what he can't ever be.

Years of rejection creeping on to him. His art? Pointless, they said. Just lines. Just shadows. Just noise. The world never wanted his kind of silence — the kind that bleeds through paper and whispers, “I saw you.”

Now, he can draw only the voids. The empty chairs. The cracked windows. The girl at the piano who doesn’t look up.

To him, she is perfection sculpted in ivory.

And he? A smudge in the background— A ghost with pencils for fingers.

And he looks down at himself — oversized hoodie, bitten fingernails, eyes always scanning for exits — he’s like a rejected sketch on a torn page.

He smiles to himself, looking at his hands,

“I am… a true void.”

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