The Piano That Found Me
A Poem in Six Acts
by Christopher Sopher
December 17, 2025
How has living with ADHD or ADD changed your life?
Comment below.
ACT I: THE FOG I WAKE UP IN
Most mornings
I wake up
ninety percent inside a cloud.
Not sleep.
Not dreams.
A fog that lives behind my eyes
and refuses to lift
no matter how well I behave.
I drink the water.
I change the diet.
Blood sugar steady.
Heart rate calm.
The numbers all agree.
My mind does not.
It has been this way
since I was a kid.
Late for everything.
Late for the boss.
Late for the bell.
Sometimes getting dressed
on the bus
because no one was waiting for me
to catch up to time.
“Get your ass on the bus,”
was the lesson.
So I did.
Hyper.
Restless.
Too much electricity in a small body.
Someone said coffee might help.
It did.
A little.
But nothing ever pierced the fog.
And now, years later,
I sit on my couch
fire lit,
Christmas tree glowing,
a bright overhead light trained on my eyes
so they remember how morning works.
Yesterday I woke with clarity.
Today
the fog returned.
ACT II: THE PLACE I’VE NEVER BEEN
Without warning
I am somewhere else.
A salt flat.
I’ve never stood in one.
Never felt one.
Yet here I am.
White everywhere.
Blinding.
The kind of brightness that doesn’t warm you
it overwhelms you.
My eyes burn.
Tears fall
not from sadness
but from too much light
forcing its way in.
The air is dry
and humid at the same time.
Breath feels borrowed.
Wind moves low across the ground
the way snow does in a storm,
skimming frozen earth,
forming ripples.
Waves without water.
I recognize the motion
before I understand the place.
I have been here before
in other forms.
ACT III: SILENCE AND SURVIVAL
I look up.
The sky is violet.
Soft.
Moving without noise.
It reminds me of a mountain
I once stood on at night.
High enough that everything stopped.
No insects.
No birds.
No sound.
Only silence
so complete
it demanded acceptance.
That silence taught me something.
When I let it in,
my higher self takes over.
It is how I survive.
It is how I see clearly
even when the fog remains.
So I stand there
not panicking,
not resisting.
Just observing.
That is when I notice
the piano.
ACT IV: THE SANCTUARY
A grand piano
made entirely of glass
rests alone in the salt.
Invisible until the sun finds it.
Then suddenly
it glows.
I walk toward it
not knowing why
only knowing I must.
Up close
it is flawless.
Cool beneath my hand.
Smooth.
Salt refuses to cling to it.
The keys move
but make no sound.
No strings answer.
This instrument
is not meant to be played.
Inside it
is life.
Hundreds of butterflies
living within its hollow body
as if the piano were a climate
built only for wings.
Gold edged in black.
Deep reds.
Purples like bruised twilight.
Every color
the spectrum forgot it carried.
Large ones.
Small ones.
Each distinct.
Each necessary.
They dance together
not trapped
but protected.
This piano is their sanctuary.
Outside it
there is nothing.
No flowers.
No shade.
No future.
So they live inside
silent music.
I know better
than to open it.
Some things survive
only when left untouched.
ACT V: THE REALIZATION
I ask myself
why it is here.
Why a glass piano
in a salt flat
where nothing else lives.
The answer does not arrive loudly.
It settles.
This piano
is my mind
during the fog.
Creation without output.
Music without sound.
Beauty without witnesses.
I thought I was stuck.
I thought I was waiting
to enter a creative flow.
But I have been creating
this entire time.
Building sanctuaries
for fragile ideas.
Keeping color alive
inside silence.
The fog never stopped me.
It only hid the stage.
And now you are standing here
inside it.
You didn’t stumble into this place.
You stepped into my world.
ACT VI: THE WAY I REMEMBER
There is no cure scene.
No finish line.
No version of me
where this disappears.
ADHD stays open.
Always moving.
Always alive.
And dyslexia
lives with it.
Not partial.
Not mild.
Complete.
Words do not stay.
Sentences fall through me
if they arrive too fast.
Working memory never learned
how to hold them.
Conversations fade.
Details dissolve.
But feelings do not.
I remember
how something felt.
And when the feeling returns,
the picture is already there.
Fully formed.
That is how I store the world.
Not in language.
Not in sequence.
But in images paired with emotion.
A photograph
that breathes.
There are no words inside my memory.
No memorization.
No scripts.
Only scenes.
That is why I see things
others miss.
Why places I have never been
still feel familiar.
Why I can step into an image
and feel the temperature of it.
If I did not think this way
I would be ordinary.
And I refuse that.
I lived most of my life
not knowing why I was different.
Hearing lazy.
Hearing unfocused.
Hearing too much.
But what I create
comes fast
because it is already there.
Twenty minutes
is all it takes
when the fog opens just enough
to let the world spill out.
This poem
was not written.
It arrived.
Spoken into being
before it could disappear.
So this is not closure
in the way others mean it.
This is acceptance.
The piano does not need to play.
The butterflies do not need release.
The fog does not need to lift.
This is how my mind survives.
This is how it creates.
And now you know.
This is not a flaw.
This is the instrument
that found me.
