Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Meets Romeo and Juliet

Caked in blood red cherries, we awoke in the afternoon sun.  The daunting task of cleaning up had left a sour taste in my hands, and they begrudgingly began to pick up the pits from the floor.  Perhaps I should have picked a fruit with less collateral, like seedless grapes or a plum.  But cherries it was, and the pits that littered the floor seemed to multiply by the hour.  

It wasn’t an easy thing, being in love and having to clean up all the cherries by myself, but the task lent itself to the mind wandering, which was promising to say the least.  Victoria had already left, the last cherry pit hitting the floor as she got up and “Had a nice time but it was time to leave,” as the pit dropped with my stomach.  

It had been a blissful afternoon, eating fruit and listening to the sound of the typewriter smacking paper with such exuberant force, it began to dull the sound of the birds outside.  The sound of the doorbell startled me, as I scrambled to find myself and open the door.  It was Victoria.  

“Hello,” she began, somewhat embarrassed to find herself knocking on the door she had just exited.  “I think I forgot my hat; I was wondering if you’d seen it?”

And so, we searched and searched, but found nothing but cherry pits and paper, the room destroyed from the fruit and our labor.  I hadn’t remembered Victoria wearing a hat when she walked through the door, and that’s something I was sure to remember.  Her dark hair, pinned in a loose-fitting style that framed her delicate face, had arrived the previous night without a hat.  I was sure of it, because I remembered the way the porch light reflected off her face, without the shadow of a hat to hide behind. 

“You seem very sure, but I don’t seem to remember you wearing a hat last night.  Do you think maybe you could have misplaced it elsewhere?”

“Oh yes I suppose that’s possible,” she said, absentmindedly kicking the cherry pits around the floor.  “It’s also possible,” as her breath drew closer, “that I came back to see you again.”

Without thinking, I blurted out the worst possible response, “What for?” and immediately regretted speaking entirely in the moment.  

“I look for excuses to love you, and you keep spitting cherries.  Why are you so far away?” Victoria responded, her face like that of a pale bird.

“It’s like this,” I began.  “You come over every night.  Sometimes you sleep in my bed, other times you sleep on the floor.  Every day I wake up a terrible mess, the birds screaming through the window.  I can’t allow myself to revel in the ambiguity of this relationship.  Life is full of uncertainty but there are some things I’m certain of and I’m certain I can’t go on without loving you, in my own way.”

“With fruit, and paper and wine?”  she replied with a sigh, the neighbor’s trumpet echoing down the hall.  “I’m sorry, I love you too.  I listen to your breathing while you sleep, from the floor and from the bed, and I can’t go on without loving you, in my own way, with misplaced hats and classical records, and nights spent on the floor amidst cherry pits.”

And so, we found something we could finally agree upon, that love was indeed, a pit, full of awful and beautiful things that meant something different to everyone.  So, from that moment on we loved each other, leaving the fruits crushed on the floor.

The story starts off slow, and then builds as the music progresses.  What begins as a small sentence turns into a large descriptive overture, much like the music of Tchaikovsky.  The theme of the story is largely the relationship between two people, something that Romeo and Juliet clearly focused on.   The contemplative state the narrator speaks in is so abruptly jarred by the happenings of the story, much like the music of Tchaikovsky.  There is an overarching contemplativeness to his music and his Romantic contemporaries such as Beethoven, but the serenity is often broken by the jolt of a trumpet, change in dynamic or the sweeping swells of the string section.  The story focuses on the inner workings of love, something composers of the Romantic period heavily focused on.