Dear Intermezzo,

I have known you since I was twenty-six, when a man older than I was then handed me a CD and said this one in particular and left it at that. I have spent more time with you than with most people. You are four minutes long. I have given you, by now, a working week.

I want to say first that I do not understand you, and that the not-understanding is most of what keeps me. Other pieces have given me everything I asked of them and I have moved on. You have given me almost nothing, and I have stayed.

You begin in B minor, which is a key that does not ask anyone to like it. The first chord is a question I have heard a thousand times and cannot answer. There is the slow walk down, the held tension, the inner voice that returns and refuses to resolve the way I keep expecting. Every time I listen I think this time I will hear what he meant, and every time the piece arrives at its small ambiguous close and lets me down gently, the way a teacher lets down a student who has not yet read the assigned book.

I do not play. I have a friend who plays you — badly, fondly — and I have heard you in his living room more often than on any recording. He plays you with the pedal down too long and the inner voice rushed, and it does not matter; Brahms wrote you so late in his life that nothing could ruin you. Anyone could play you and the bones would hold.

I have noticed that I put you on at the hour I belong to. The light is doing the thing it does at four; there is a coffee gone cool on the table; I am not doing anything in particular. You come in like weather — not a piece I have chosen but a piece I have allowed — and I sit through you the way a man sits through a slow rain.

What I want to say to you, which I have not said before, is thank you. Not for being beautiful — many pieces are beautiful, and they have not done what you have done. Thank you for not finishing. For arriving at your last chord without claiming to have answered anything. Thank you for the small lesson in ending honestly.

I will probably listen to you tonight. I will probably not understand you.

I will be there anyway.