Ever since I can remember, I have been allured by music. It began with instruments, the shape of them, their exquisite beauty, and wooden sheen. I was stimulated by the orchestra and drew sketches of conductors who could create music through the voices of one hundred people. I studied their podiums, their batons everything about them was an object of my interest.

My father gave me a toy violin when I was four or five. It played songs by the very best of classical composers, whose music I began to revere. Soon my mother took me to see Handel’s Messiah at Christmastime. It was then that my interest shifted from the instruments themselves to the composers who poured their creations through them. I learned their solemn faces, their extravagant beards and powdered wigs through picture books. I began to read and then to listen to whatever I could. I doted over the music of Bach, the ingenious German, a father of twenty children I could have recounted these facts like a second language at six.

I can only imagine that my family and friends thought I was destined to be a musician.

I still have a faint memory of being seven, sitting in a trance in a dusty violin shop. A small violin poised beneath my chin, nursing it like a baby. The curves of it were the highest form of beauty a child could grasp. My mother arranged for guitar lessons a few years later, knowing my desire to follow in the tracks of the latest objects of my infatuations, The Beatles and Three Dog Night. I took lessons weekly and practiced as well as my weak focus would allow.

Soon after, I had to drop them I don’t remember exactly why. I went through a long lapse not playing myself, but still adoring the music. I couldn’t seem to commit to any instrument and despised myself for it. I understood that practice and discipline was the only path for learning to play the emotional, transcendent music I so revered.
I began tapping my foot in anguish, unable to express what I felt I so deeply connected with. Listening to CDs in the car, I tapped and let my mind be content with listening, until the years passed one after another. I had shut myself out from music because it was too painful to accept the inability to express what I felt inside.

In my third year at boarding school, I took up the piano. Suddenly. I felt I could express my passion for music in the smallest of ways. I transferred schools the next year, became caught up in other activities and haven’t had the opportunity to continue. In the period just after I transferred, a spell of intense loneliness and confusion occupied me. It became so excruciating that I turned to the only medium I could. I began writing instead of speaking.

My writing began as what I thought was an essay, blocky unformed paragraphs surfacing and evolving from within. It was like a physical pain that needed to be relieved. Eventually, as I worked with the text. I paired it down, slicing away the excess like whittling a piece of wood into a sharp point, something I thought I could use to protect myself. As it became thinner and thinner, it became redefined.

No longer was this an ambiguous block of words.

I knew what this was.

It was poetry.

It was like the music through words. The music that I loved, filled with longing or regret, or love, passion, it was capable of conjuring anything. I had composed something that was a true offering from within. I still lose my breath, when I read the poem, not because it is perfect, but because I know that a part of me is hidden in the straight black lines of the verse.

As I am sitting here writing this reflection, I think of my picture book composers. I see the face of Johann Sebastian Bach smiling from the pages, there is Mozart, a bawdy grin on his face, and above me, Beethoven looks down benignly. I have not forgotten their violins, their cantatas, their operas. They are still with me, playing softly in my childhood memories. As I look to what is distant and unknown, I know that I will create and compose, for me, this is the only way.

I have finally found my instrument.