The very first hotel in Ethiopia, the Taitu is in classy decay all the way. A hundred and ten years live and rot in that wood. All ethnicities one can imagine ghosting through the hallways. Big old volumes of stories that never fully ended if you ask the remaining molecules that drip from the damp ceilings. The place has its own air, atmosphere, and climate. The restaurant’s walls are an accident of burgundy, salmon, and chestnut, even some puddles of purple in my favorite corner where I hide under all the paint that has flaked off – decadence dying just like anything else. The light bulbs. Some cold, some warm, most of them without shades and vigor. Four of them joined in a poor man's chandelier. No juice on the menu, just beer and soda. Pizza, yes, on the menu. The cheese optional. Not a pizza that one. Meaningless paintings scattered over the walls unevenly. Power cuts every other hour to remind us of our species’ grand, cursed accomplishments. Every upper middle-class person in town seems acquainted with the vegan lunch buffet. I raise mountains on my plate, then a second round of hummus with that rustic dark bread. There isn’t the slightest need to build these gluttonous Babylonian food-towers. It’s all you can eat, not all you can eat at once. But here I am now, pouring another ladle of pure relish.

Someone is playing the piano today and the guy next to me hums along while he loads his plate in a much more civilized fashion. Dimdiduududu, dadadidimdudu. It goes well with the smooth aura shining all around his buff build like a muscular halo. This time, I end up on one of the metal chairs with that upholstery that looks and feels like rude plastic, but I do get to look at the wooden chairs, and that is more important because eyes are spoiled beings and asses aren’t. Eyes demand aesthetics, asses just a surface. People eat with their hands, like in South Asia. I need to go to the reception, but the tune circles around me until I’m tied down to the chair. A woman is playing. She is neither old nor young – her age is beautiful. She just keeps playing and playing, walking her hands up and down the keys without going anywhere near a distinguishable song. It is all one long chance symphony, an improvised harmony. One song, inventing and reinventing itself over and over again like ocean waves. She plays in trance, as though she’s striking a secret code on the keys to open the door to her personal dimension behind the piano. What an elegant trip. With that water bottle and the saltshaker atop the piano she’s got everything she needs to play forever and a day.

Her hair is pinned up. She wears pearl earrings, a chocolate sweater, a golden ring on her left ring finger, and a small rectangular watch. Only few others around me have the luxury of being without company, of being fully able to join her symphony with the mind in it. All in all, there is a deeper knowledge in this room and some carry devices to intercept it. Sometimes she turns her head and looks at me, or maybe at the table in-between us, or maybe through me. Maybe I am melting into the dimension she is writing with the keys. Maybe she’s inviting all of us along. She seems lonely, sitting there inside an entire world that doesn't get her much, doesn't give a funk about her. I am free in her tune, but perishable. She is becoming an immortal prisoner in my word, living on this page forever for better or worse. I must leave a free man. But it’s hard to let go of such moments, such delicacies, even knowing full well that one has to live on. It can all linger in the mind, but not in the room. She stops playing before I can leave and it makes me sad because in my mind, and only there, the whole room had applauded her. I go up to her. “That was beautiful, thank you.” She smiles and mumbles something in an alien tongue. Our verbal exchange is a cryptic salad of words, but the feelings between those twisty lines are crips as blips and our smiles easily deciphered.