There’s always a moment after I stop playing where everything feels slightly unfamiliar again.
The cello goes quiet, the poem is no longer being read, and for a second there’s just the room. The ordinary version of it, without anything layered on top. But what I’ve noticed is that the piece doesn’t really end there. Something always stays behind.
Not in a dramatic way. It’s subtle.
Sometimes it’s a rhythm that keeps repeating in my head. Sometimes it’s a single note that feels like it’s still hanging in the air longer than it should. Other times it’s just the emotional shape of the thing—the way a poem and the cello moved around each other, even if I can’t replay it exactly.
That’s what I’ve started thinking of as what lingers.
It’s not the performance itself. It’s not even the memory of it in a clean, linear way. It’s more like an afterimage. Something you don’t fully look at directly, but you know is still there when you turn away.
I used to think the goal was to capture the poem in sound in a way that felt complete. That once the cello finished, the experience would feel resolved. But that’s not really what happens. Even when something feels “finished,” it keeps unfolding a little in your mind afterward, like it hasn’t fully agreed to end yet.
And I think that’s true for both poetry and music.
A poem doesn’t stop existing when you finish reading it. It keeps echoing in the way you interpret certain words later, or in how a line suddenly comes back to you at a different time of day. The cello is the same way. A phrase doesn’t disappear just because it’s been played; it settles somewhere quieter.
What I like most about this space after sound is that it doesn’t belong to either form anymore. It’s no longer just poetry, and it’s no longer just music. It becomes something shaped by both, but completed by neither.
And in a way, that feels like the real collaboration.
Not what happens while I’m reading or playing, but what continues after I’ve stopped. The part I can’t control anymore. The part that lives in someone else’s memory, or in my own a few minutes later, when I realize I’m still holding onto something I didn’t mean to keep.
That’s what lingers: not the performance, but the echo of it.
