The Time I Listed the Guitar That Sat Behind the Door for Three Years

The guitar leans in the corner, right behind the bedroom door. To get into the room I open the door halfway and turn my shoulder to slip through, because opened all the way, the door would hit the body of the guitar. I have done this for three years. My shoulder has made a habit of it.

The dust on the front is thin enough that you could write a single letter in it with one finger. My wife, Thu, has never said a word about it. Only, every weekend the body looks a little cleaner, and I know who wipes it.

Last Friday afternoon I dragged it out, set it under my desk lamp, and photographed it to sell. It took three days to finish, and it is worth telling because it did not finish the way I expected.

The guitar behind the door

I bought it on a tired afternoon. I am an air-conditioner technician. I had spent the whole day climbing onto the roof terrace of an apartment building to fix an outdoor unit, sun beating off the metal roofing, sweat running into my eyes, a pressure gauge in my hand, feeling like one more part of the machine. On the way home I passed a small music shop and went in just to ask the price, to know what it was.

The clerk handed me the guitar and told me to try a string. I plucked one. The note hung in the shop, cool and thick, nothing like the fan wind of an outdoor unit all day. I stood there listening to it fade, and in my head appeared a man sitting out on a porch in the evening, feet up on a plastic chair, playing a tune for his wife. That man looked a lot more at ease than I did.

I bought it. That night I told Thu, "I'm taking on a few extra jobs this round," and she nodded.

I played it four days. Three chords, fingertips stinging as if pricked by needles, and the F chord would not hold no matter how many nights I studied it. By the second week I was getting home late, by the third I told myself I would wait for the weekend. The weekend had an urgent job. Then one day the guitar got leaned in the corner to clear the walkway, and it stayed there.

The place where I almost did not press post

Ten o'clock Friday night, I wrote the caption for the post in a secondhand-goods group: "Acoustic guitar, barely played, like new." My finger stopped at the words "barely played." Barely? Four days. I deleted it, typed "played very little," deleted that too, then left the post as a draft and went to sleep.

Two days later it was still sitting there. I opened it, looked, closed it. Opened it, looked, closed it. Two voices were arguing in my head, neither of them loud.

"If I sell, I lose money. The guitar wasn't cheap."

"Lose what? It sat behind a door for three years. It never earned anything."

"But selling means admitting something."

"Admitting what?"

"That I'm not the man who sits on the porch in the evening and plays."

That last line made me go still. Until then I had thought I was weighing the guitar, heavy or light, profit or loss. I was not. I was weighing whether to let the man on the porch go. The guitar was just where I had asked him to stand for a while.

Monday evening, Thu asked while folding clothes, not looking at me:

"Did you post it yet?"

"How do you know I was going to post it?"

"You photographed it four times."

I laughed, one line like that from her is enough. Then I picked up my phone and pressed post, with the words "barely played" corrected to the truth: "played four days, my hands just weren't a match."

Saturday afternoon, the buyer arrives

The first person to write was Phát, a second-year university student, and we agreed on four o'clock at the café at the mouth of my alley. He came on a motorbike, parked it flush against the wall, and his eyes never left the guitar case on my shoulder.

Phát opened the case, lifted the guitar out, sat down and tuned it by ear, no tuner. He pressed one chord, then the next, then the F chord, pressed it cleanly as if it were nothing. The sound rose over the café, over the ice grinder and the owner calling someone to pick up a glass.

"What can you play?"

"I could play it for four days."

Phát laughed and I did too. He asked nothing more. Some people only need to hear that sentence to understand the whole story.

The price was lower than what I had paid. I did not sit down and work out the difference. As I counted the money I noticed something odd: there was nowhere in me that stung. There was just one place that felt lighter, the way it does when you lift a whole crate off your shoulder.

Back home I stood in front of the bedroom door for a while, then opened it all the way. The door swept one clean arc to the wall without touching anything. The first time in three years. I stood there and felt my shoulder, which had always been tilted ahead of time, straighten for no good reason.

I am not drawing the lesson from this that you should sell whatever sits unused. Some people keep a guitar four years, five years, and every time they see it they are glad, because it reminds them of something real. I am not one of them, and knowing I am not one of them is also a kind of enough. If you are standing between two ways and do not yet know which is yours, there is a piece that felt in the same spirit to me: deleting old photos or keeping them, and why both are right.

Ten minutes for something that sits unused

After that day I tried doing what I should have done first, with another thing in the house, a folding treadmill nobody had touched in three months.

The first time I wrote the third line, my hand paused. It turned out the treadmill carried a person too, one who got up at six, sweaty, and ate breakfast late. When I finished, I did not feel I had to do anything right away. I only felt that person cling a little less to the machine. After a week, some things I decided to pass on, some I kept, and some I still do not know about. Some people finish this and feel that is enough, some feel nothing at all, and that is fine.

On busy days, the third line alone is enough, typed into your phone's notes. The easy place to trip is to write it and then rush to sell or tidy, from the feeling that you have to deal with it and be done. This does not ask that. It only asks you to see the person the object has been holding for you.

If you like to look wider, there is a piece on decluttering your living space to relieve mental pressure, which starts from one small drawer.

The bedroom door opens all the way every evening now. The hinge makes one soft sound.

I still cannot hold the F chord.

This article was created with AI assistance.