The prelude was fine. I played "In the Garden" fine. I felt a little flutter when the music director wasn't out on time, but that's nothing new, really. He's usually in the back working on one last run through on something, and so I take it around one more time, glance at the little clock I keep on the organ console to see if I need to stretch the piece I'm playing or if I have enough time to shift to a different one. Nothing prepared me for the sheer nightmare that was coming.
It happened during the first congregational hymn which was always going to be tricky anyway since it was one we hadn't done in a long, long time. The music just...went away. The notes were there on the page, but they were practically meaningless, especially those for my right hand. I could only stare in them in panic, reach for bass chords. I felt my face flush, my fair complexion betraying my distress.
"It's just this song," I kept telling myself. "Pull it together. Chord it. Get through, and the next one will be better." I hit the ending notes, sometimes the only ones that matter because if you can at least end on the right notes at least it doesn't sound horrible at the end, and I took a deep breath during the prayer. It had to be better during the next song. I knew that one.
But it wasn't. It really wasn't.
The third, the offertory, was an old favorite, and by that point I was actually shaking. Fortunately, my musical ear and my brain just bypassed my dead eyes at that point and took over. I played it with minimal error, and it sounded like I knew what I was doing. But I can guarantee you whatever I was doing and however it was being done, whatever mechanism was active, ghostly possession by Ms. Sarah, my music teacher who passed away while I was in college; innate rote repetition of that song; divine mercy; whatever, it wasn't sight reading.
I was up for the offertory solo tonight, my pianist friend and I rotating that duty week-to-week. I wanted to laugh, cry, or run away during the prayer beforehand, but I stayed on the bench, set the stops on the organ, slid the music onto the stand, and tried to remember what chords those stupid little blotches represented. I have been playing the piano since I was seven, the organ since I was ten. The piece I was playing was not an elaborate variation. It was an old hymn in the key of C major. It was like I was suddenly made so illiterate that I could not read a child's storybook. I honestly had a moment where I thought I would not be able to play it at all, and then that automatic something went click and my hands moved for me and music came out...more or less.
After the sermon came the invitational, a song I've played probably a million times. It went better, but I could feel the first twinges of a migraine beginning. It's still rumbling like distant thunder on the horizon. I am trying to get all my work done so if it does come down like I think it is planning to, I can take a phenergan and make myself unconscious.
This....this scares me. When it does things like this to me, I don't know if it is the Topamax, the migraines, or something else. Why am I like this? It doesn't make any sense. And why does it take the music? It takes my spoken words, too, sometimes, but as I look at this page, I can read every single line. Will it one day take this from me, too? It's a terrible thing to be afraid of your own mind. I wish I understood what was happening to me better. It makes me feel like I'm trapped in a room with Boo Radley. I never know from day to day if he's going to save me or stab me in the leg with that damn pair of scissors.
