To feel

      I push the massive door and enter the floor. Despite the fact that it is only one o’clock in the afternoon, there is twilight in the corridor: the only window at the end faces in the opposite direction from the sun and almost no rays penetrate here. The fifth floor is uninhabited: empty classrooms, which even smell different — dust and new chairs, — were occupied by graduating classes last year, but they left, and the new twelfth-graders remained on the floor below.       Rusting steps bounce off the walls as I walk through the corridor. Even the clear “class against the stairs” flies out of my head and I decide to start searching with the one that is at the very end. When I silently open the door and look into the empty room, guitar strumming is barely audible and muffled along the corridor. I turn around, cross the corridor and open the opposite door. Again empty.       Finally, I open the desired class, and the melody envelops me in a weightless blanket. He sits on the desk, with the back to me, and concentrates on the strings of the guitar. The sun filled the deserted classroom, including climbing into his reddish hair, and I froze in the doorway, listening to a tune unknown to me. Just one step and I will become part of something beautiful contained in this room. But at the same time, I stand, unable to do it, because the house of cards could collapse if I’ll add an extra one.              I go into the room and call out to him. He turns around, with a familiar movement adjusts his glasses that had slipped down during the playing guitar and greets me back. By the time I reach the desk next to him, I take off the ukulele case from my shoulder, which has become a part of me. I sit down on the desk and take out the tuner.       “How are you?” I ask casually, twisting the pegs until the string starts to sound as it should and I move on to the next one.       “Fine,” he waits patiently for me to finish tuning the instrument, watching the scenery through the window, “I found a song for you. You already know almost all the chords, you learned them last time, but the rest are just easy.”              He takes out his phone, looks for something and hands it to me. I’m looking throigh words with signed chords. Nothing complicated: Am, G, C, F… from the new Dm, Em and E7, but even they look trivial. While he plays something, I try to pinch the chords and combine them with the strumming. It turns out bad. I don’t know the song, so the rhythm is difficult.       “How to play it?” I ask, looking up from the bar to the guy.       “Look,” he adjusts his glasses again and begins to play slowly, “for each chord, except the last two, you play down, down, up, up, down, up. Then to the penultimate chord down, down, up, and to the last one — up, down, up. A total of six combinations are obtained. And so on in a circle.”       I nod gratefully and return to trying. He watches first, then joins in, playing the same song on his guitar. After about ten attempts, I stop getting lost on each successive chord and something passable comes out, although the strings still rattle unpleasantly when I pinch the string too loosely. He waits patiently until I once again achieve the perfect sound of the chord and we start again. The strings cut my fingertips unpleasantly, but I continue to play, strumming the chords with such force that my nails turn white. He is sitting opposite, adjusting, time after time, with incredible patience, to my crooked game.       “Try to play slower,” he advises when I again get confused between Dm and Em. I slow down and the quality of the game increases exponentially with each new lap.       I glance at the phone screen — it’s one sixteen — and abruptly interrupt the game mid-sentence. The fifth floor is the only place in the school where you can’t hear the bell.       “I have to go. Physics,” I say reluctantly. I don’t really want to go down to the stuffy, noisy classroom on the third floor. I want to stay here and play song after song until my fingers start skipping chords as fluently as his, “when’s the next time you’re free?”       His face takes on a thoughtful expression and I wait for an answer, putting the ukulele back in its case.       “I don’t know,” he finally says, “I’ve already been accepted into the university, so there’s no point in going to school anymore.”       “Congratulations!” I lean on the desk and smile, “which major?”       “Computer engineering,” he smiles too.       “Sounds cool. Are you planning to stay here?”       “For now, yes,” he also puts down the guitar, “but then, after graduating from university, I plan to move to another country.”       I nod understandingly.       “Okay, I’m already very late,” I sigh and go to the door, only to turn around on the way out and add, “let me know the next time you’re at school, okay?”       “Of course,” he adjusts his glasses, takes the guitar again and turns to the window. I look around the class as if trying to remember, and finally go out into the dark, dusty corridor. There are no thoughts in the head — only the remnants of a memorized song, which have crowded out everything else, sound in the void, collide and scatter in sparks of yellow sounds.       When I open the door to the stairs, a light guitar melody flows through the corridor again, flowing from the classroom, his classroom filled with golden light, where he, sitting on his desk and frowning in concentration, plucks the strings of the red guitar.