The Old Rusty Piano and The Pink Ballet Shoes (pt. 2)

We are a perfect lover. We don’t always be together. But the important thing is we know we love each other.

I marry you in a small chapel at the outskirts of the town. It has a small garden, and it’s perfect for our small garden party. We invite our friends, only the closest one, and our family. They smile happily, they can see the happily-ever-after in our eyes.

On the happiest day of our life, we’re dancing at the front. You look beautiful in your white wedding gown. You say that I’m gorgeous in that white tux. I hold your body close to mine, and we slowly dance, enjoying the elapsing moments, the seconds that move slowly when we are together. And suddenly you cry on my shoulder. I don’t say a thing, it’s an I-glad-I-found-you tears, and I don’t really need to say a thing. You can feel my heart beating the same thoughts, but I couldn’t cry in front of you or this people. I act to be tough, but still I shiver.

Then we go to travel agent, looking for some place to have a honeymoon on…


Where do you wanna spend our honeymoon? I ask you.
I don’t need a honeymoon, I just need to be with you, you reply.
I smile.


So, we don’t take the honeymoon trip, since we don’t really need one: everyday is a honeymoon day for us. Both of us take a week off from the work so we really could be together. We’ll open the wedding present, and surprised by it. There are black lingerie (why don’t you put it on?), a coffee maker (we already have one),

It’s just the time when we’re making love all day or just laying naked on the bed without thinking about what time is now and we have to go to work and else so we don’t really have to get up. We just lay there nakedly and hold each other’s body. But then it’s noon already and we’re hungry, so we decided to wake up and cook chicken cordon blue together.

You are happy. I am as pleased as you are. We are the happiest newly-wed couple for the entire history in the universe.

Few weeks later, you come to me with the brightest smile in your eyes and excitedly run to me and say,
We’re gonna have a girl!
And we spend the rest of the day clinging to each other, talking about the name of the baby, while I softly embrace your belly.


* * *

We have two kids, Nina and Ksatria. Nina was born two years earlier before Ksatria. She is an active and cheerful, and has a very attractive smile that makes everyone happy until the end of the day…


…she has wonderful smile like yours, I said it to you.
You smiled.
I watched your smile, Yeah, she really smiles just like you….


…while Ksatria is a calm, a little bit shy I think, but genius in the way he thinks. He loves reading and gets good grades academically.


…and he will have your beautiful eyes that I love, you interrupted.
I looked at you, and smiled.


We want them to follow our line of profession. You want Nina to be a lawyer just like you, while I hope Ksatria want to be an architect like I was. It’s okay though if they don’t want to, we won’t push them anyway. But we don’t really need to push them, they are the one who want to be like us. Nina admires the way you defend the innocent one, and Ksatria loves to sketch any view he sees. One day, he will sketches us sitting on the bench beneath the Eifell tower and gives it as a present for our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Every afternoon, we gather on the usual bench beneath the Eiffel. Both of us are from our office, while Nina from her ballet class, and Ksatria from his piano class. We eat the sandwiches I bought at the bakery not faraway from there, then walking home together. Sometimes we sing and laugh, don’t care whether the other pedestrian are looking at us or not. What a perfect family we have.

At night, all of us sit on the sofa with our white bathrobe, watching the drama on the soap opera, laughing at the jokes, tell the special incident we had today like the fat girl who fell in love with Ksatria, or the handsome brother Nina’s ballet-class friend has. Then we put our masker together, which surprised the pizza-delivery guy when Ksatria opened the door.

Sometimes we ask Nina’s boyfriend or Ksatria’s girl to come and have a dinner with us. But since they don’t have any, we just eat together as a family. Sometimes before we sleep, Nina and Ksatria put on a show for us. They turn off the lights, leaving one-two bulbs spot lights on the wall. Ksatria plays the old piano, it’s one of the romantic songs he made before. I bought the old piano on the second-handed store. It was rusty and had this dust and spider web all over it, but it still good though. I can’t afford something more expensive but I want Ksatria to have his own piano on his seventh birthday. But it turns out that he really loves it, no matter how cheap the cost is or how dreadful it looks. The only thing that matter is how his father loves him and the way he plays the piano.

After thirty seconds of minor 7th melodies he made himself, the music takes a pause for a moment, and continues as Nina comes in and does the ballet. She fall in love with ballet when we took her watching your old friend performance in the theater building near our apartment, and she shouted excitedly when she looked a pair of pink ballet shoes in her birthday-box present from you. And now just look how elegantly she moves, while she only twelve years girl.

We never thought the presents would turn them to be like this. We hold hands and cry…


I stopped. You cried. I watched closely, yes, it is the dripping tears from your eyes. I panicked for a while, held you near and wiped the tears away,
…why do you cry, dear? You don’t like the story?
You don’t answer, you just cried on my shoulder.
Come, come, there’s no such thing for you to cry about.
You sobbed, no, it’s the future that I want to have with you…
And there was a slight moment of pause in my breath, a moment of emptiness of air in my lung, the moment that made me realized how you really really love me.
Finally I got a grip of myself, said nothing but continued the story…


Yes, their performance is fantastic. We cry our happy tears, and they love to see us happy like that. But it’s night already so we take them on their rooms, and kiss them goodnights. We get into our room too, maybe we’ll make love before we sleep, or reading the books first then sleep. We don’t forget to kiss each other and saying ‘I love you’s.

That night and the same other nights, we sleep with that happy smile in our faces,
what a perfect family we have.


* * *