Chilled

            Chen came from Taiwan to study piano at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia when she was fifteen.  A small, quiet girl with dimples, she spoke hardly any English when I first met her.  Conversations were basic and slow, consisting mostly of, “How are you?” and “What do you like to eat?”  But over the next six years that I knew her, she became fluent, and we developed a unique bond.  Both only children, we declared ourselves sisters before her studies eventually took her to Yale, then all around the world, sharing the delicate poetry of her piano chords.  During her years in Philadelphia, though, we were family.  I was three years younger, and admired her talent and passion, and feared the bravery that brought her to a foreign country to nurture her gift.  When she played the piano, she swayed gently and comfortably as the muscles in her small arms tremored over the keys.  She evoked something soft and formidable.

When she pulled away from the piano, she was a shy, earnest girl with a smile and an ear for a story.  We were both in school, and would talk for hours about Taiwan, America, and our schoolwork.  While her English improved, from time to time she would twist a phrase.

            “Did you know Arthur Rubinstein tried to kill his life?” she asked my father solemnly one afternoon.

            One February evening after dinner, we were walking down Germantown Avenue in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia.  I was twenty, and Chen was twenty-three.  It was dark and icy cold that night.  Wet heavy snow fell around us as we hurried to the car, our hats and scarves bundled tightly around our ears and cheeks, mittened hands securing our down coats.  We climbed into the backseat of my dad’s sedan, where we huddled to warm up.

            “Have you ever been chilled to the bone,” Chen asked me, “and not because of the cold?”

            I’m not sure my answer was entirely coherent.  Certainly the day I watched the life drain from my small dog’s eyes was a day I felt chilled, my own blood cooling as hers slowly froze.  The morning I awoke in a dense fog, heartbroken and abandoned, I felt my bones tingle as I realized there was no escaping—I had to bear the deep lashes of loneliness on my raw stripped skin.  I felt chilled to the bone the day I learned of the death of my elementary school teacher, a Catholic nun I both feared and revered.  I felt it the day a mentally ill old man approached me alone at the train station, as he wavered between slinging curses and telling me how beautiful I was, leaving me utterly exposed and defenseless.

Those moments that quiver through the pockets of your marrow are, perhaps, the reminders of how human we are.  That something can resonate so deeply as to chill our blood, to quell its flow momentarily as we struggle to grasp the perplexity of a given moment, another pearl on a string, profound and sacred, yet no different from the rest.  It’s the moment where truth unveils itself in its stark, blank nakedness, unashamed at the stir it causes in its suddenness.  Chen uncovered many of those truths in her music.  They were palpable as chords echoed and her spine heaved, as her long black hair flipped behind her neck.  I only wonder if those are the moments she thought of when she asked that question—those moments of the divine bearing down in uncomfortable ways, ready to grasp you by the shoulders and steer you head on into the cool face of truth.