Issue Three: Resistance Isn’t Futile

You tilt your head out of the window and suddenly you see—an abandoned violin on the sidewalk. The wheel shakes in your hand and you certainly didn’t signal while changing lanes, but you veer into a parking stall. Something’s still in the air, something that makes you remember to roll your window up and get out of the car, rush across the street and grab the violin. 

It’s clearly in good condition—car headlights shine and wink off the dappled brown wood, flashing like the light on your work phone. The bow still rests on the pavement, with taut, clean strings. And it’s weighing down a marked sheet of paper–no, sheets. A book of violin music with dogeared pages and highlighted songs. 

You have no reason to still be staring at the violin, but you are. It’s a work night and you’d normally be looking at your TV already, but you aren’t. Maybe it was the breeze, maybe it was that you picked up the book, flipped through it, and remembered that you once knew how to play those songs. You’re sure that you’re happier now, unable to read the music, with nothing to hate about work and constant entertainment when you’re home–but you’re now holding the book and the bow and the violin. You realize this is your first decision in who knows how long as you walk back to your car and drive home. Guilt settles like a blanket on your shoulders–you’ve broken no law, but your company’s employees are not encouraged to have hobbies. 

At home, you’re still hesitant and the weight of feeling hasn’t lifted. You’ve forgotten how uncomfortable worrying was, how awful it felt to have to choose what to do next. You almost consider calling your work–there would surely be someone still on the line, ready to help you start self-medicating by tomorrow. But you’ve not taken the pill for ages and an even deeper dread grabs you when you think about restarting. You have something against the very product you sell, and it seems to come from the same place as the urge to pick up the bow and the nighttime wind.

This is becoming unbearable for you–you’re asking too many questions of yourself, more than you’ve asked in years. And so you do what you’ve wanted to do since you saw that violin. You open the music book, rest the violin between your shoulder and chin, pick up the bow, and place it on the violin’s strings, suddenly recalling how you played in your childhood. You mimic the remembered motions–the smooth, confident first swipe of your bow to start a piece; the subtle tremors of your hand to hold a high note; the sharp near-swing of your arm to harmonize with an imagined orchestra. You carry heaven and earth in a single note and let them go with the next. You’d never lost those years of practice, they’d simply been suppressed by an empty thoughtlessness the world pushed into you. 

As you put down the bow, you realize you can’t continue to live this way, with this job, with this emptiness. Yes, you’re afraid that someone heard you playing and you’ll somehow lose everything, but you’ve been starved of doing what you were made for. You won’t neglect this part of yourself so easily, and you pick up your bow again–this time to play the piece in the book. You don’t know what tomorrow will look like and how you will survive without a reliable numbness, but your worries vanish faster than the sound of each note. And you don’t see it as you stare at your sheet music, but the wild animals sleep more soundly, the morning glories begin to bloom early, and the stars shine more brightly.