White Piano

Her name was Beatrix and she lived upstairs on the second floor, just above my flat. She entered my life just after my father exited it. I was 22 at the time, I remember that clearly. She was a peculiar girl, like none I'd met before or after her. Eyes sparkling blue and childlike, tiny, vulnerable frame and wavy blonde cherub-like curls; her fascination with angels was no surprise at all.

Mine was non existent at the time; not sure who to trust and what to believe in I was just plodding along in life, waiting for something to happen.

One day I bumped into Beatrix on the way home and noticed her eyes were red from crying. I invited her in for a cup of tea and she ended up staying for several months. Where
she came from or where she then disappeared to I might never know, but she left a mystery behind that I am still trying to solve.

Among her few possessions were a bunch of angel books that she kept in a pile in the living room. I didn't show much interest in them until one day she handed me one to have a look at. I sat down on the sofa and opened it on a random page in the middle somewhere, only to find the script of a conversation between a girl and her father. It was a psychic reading where the girl, her name was Laura I believe, was talking to her dead father and he was apologising to her for all the things that he had done. Later on in the conversation the grandfather appeared as well and explained to the girl that he is the one to blame for everything, as he too was an alcoholic and had mistreated her father.

This was my first major dealing with a coincidence of this magnitude. The first thing that came to my mind was that if somebody had swapped the names around and put my name instead of Laura's, every word would be an exact mirror of how things panned out in my family. I was puzzled and not sure what to think; part of me thought that perhaps this was how my Dad was trying to communicate with me, part of me thought things like that can't happen, especially not to me. Nevertheless I shared my thoughts with Beatrix over a nervous cigarette on the balcony; to which her reply was "wait till you see what happens in 11 years time"
I remember thinking "no you can't do this to me, I can barely wait five minutes for things let alone 11 years!!! Nevertheless, as it became clear that she wasn't going to let on any more of whatever she was referring to I worked out in my head that I would be 33 when this thing, whatever it was, was going to occur...

A note from almost ten years after writing this entry - two days ago my mum told me while painting pottery together in a cafe, that Laura was one of the names they thought of giving me. (02.03.2026)