25th Oct, Part 1: Que Sera Sera

Funny how, since the moment I woke up till that very second before my Jury, I had been going about things slowly. And deliberately so. I took my time dragging my ass out of bed; took my time preparing and cooking lunch; took my time shuffling through the first floor in a sloth-like manner in finding an unoccupied piano room to practice; and took my time making myself comfortable at a table in the cafeteria for the long wait.

And when Mr. Willy opened The Door to signal my turn to plea my case before the court, I mean, to be juried, it was as if time was pulling a GOTCHA on me. What. Wasn’t it just half an hour ago when I came to sit at the waiting area? How could it be a freaking hour and a half already?!

“So you’re playing Desafinado: A Little out of Tune, huh? How out of tune will it be? Should we give the piano a kick before you start, so that the off-tune sound would fit the piece?”

I just gaped while the 2 lecturers chuckled to themselves. Good God.

For some reason, my tempo kept increasing and I struggled to pull the reigns and tuck the speed back into a safe, steady zone, giving my heart this lurching feeling for the first 15 minutes, like I was riding a wave. Maybe it was the weight of the stares from the 2 jurors sitting barely a feet away to my left, or maybe time was taking its sweet revenge for my defying it.

Then came my final song; the ensemble piece.

Which was fine till Simon poked his head around the doorway of The Jam Room and went, “Hey, can I come in and watch?”

Hell no.

Tok Khon was saying something around that line but my teacher was like, “But I haven’t even seen my own student played in a band before.”

And before my brain could actually make sense of the situation, Simon grabbed his bag and was sitting there behind the 2 jurors and giving me the thumbs up. Double you tee eff?!

But the weird thing was, the song actually turned out more smoothly than I thought possible, despite the shaking of my hands. Even incomprehensible was, I felt sort of calmer, slightly more settled and confident, not that anyone could tell, not from my drained face. Hmmm. And Simon seemed to be nodding when I was done.

Not that my mind was ingesting that, it was busy singing FREEDOM.

Results? Que sera sera.