As the motions came unbidden to her fingers, the young woman sat still while her hands worked so quickly that only a few of the hundreds attending her solo concert that night could see her hands actually move. The violin, resting comfortably and familiarly on her chin, allowed her to feel the subtle vibrations of the strings as they shook when her bow flew over the twine. Her eyes had closed long ago, the music etched into her mind so perfectly that it was as if she had practiced the piece for her entire life. In fact, she had only practiced this particular piece of music for three weeks.
For years, the young prodigy had been hailed by her tutors for her extraordinary ability to memorize music so proficiently that she had mastered one of the toughest movements to ever learn in three weeks.
That piece was what she was performing was tougher than that. In fact, the woman was presenting in front of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, eager to hear her incredible talent. Before the performer knew it, the piece was over, and the crowd was applauding loudly and with such enthusiasm that her ears nearly went deaf. She also was somewhat worried that all of the roses that were being thrown at her would cut up her form-fitting brown dress with their thorns.
Bowing politely and waving to her appreciative audience, Vanessa McCormick faded into the limelight as the next performer came onto the stage and multiple busybodies scurried around the stage, picking up the small souvenirs that had been thrown at the prodigy in appreciation for her performance. Receiving warm congratulations from legitimate backstage passes- and from a few who didn’t- Vanessa weaved her way through the sea of human bodies to her dressing room. Politely closing the door behind her as she promised autographs as soon as her hands refrained from being so numb, the young woman pressed her back against the wooden door.
A loud thump shook her from her position seated at the base of the door. ‘Must be another fan trying to break his way in again,’ she thought. The thought made her sneer. Ever since she had begun to practice music at the tender age of three, Vanessa had hated boys and everything they represented. Of course, this apathy towards the less fair of the sexes didn’t come until her preteen years, when nearly every boy in school tried to ask her out. Every time that she had been asked, the young girl had always respectfully declined, citing her need to practice her music. This rejection of the local male populace somewhat limited her potential social butterfly status to something akin to a moth, but she didn’t mind, know, or care. In fact, if someone had asked her what her social "status" was when she was attending grade school, Vanessa wouldn’t have been able to give them any accurate reply whatsoever. All of her free time was consumed by practicing her music, only leaving her room to eat and do homework.
None of this mattered to her parents, who were always on business trips and never saw their only child anyway. Even if they were both in their twenty-room mansion and she was on one of her rare trips outside her room, their paths never met, due to the incredible size of the house in which the three of them lived. In fact, all that her parents knew was that their daughter was a brilliant musical prodigy, that her tutor cost $80 per month, and that they were both extremely proud of their little Vanessa. Of course, by the time that Vanessa’s parents had still referred to her as their "little Vanessa", she was 15 years old, but none of the three had noticed, each being too busy with their own devices to realize the oversight.
None of these reminisces were traveling through the musician’s mind as she stood up and began to change into her casual clothing for the long drive home. "Home" wasn’t that much of a home at all, in fact. Although Vanessa had made a great deal of money with her almost daily performances in front of huge audiences, the woman of twenty-three years lived in a small, four-room apartment. In fact, the apartment itself was just enough for her to eat, sleep, wash, and practice her music. Everything else…was just not worth wasting time over that could be better spent learning a new piece or perfecting an old one.
Her neighbors, the vast majority of whom she didn’t know or care to know, loved it when she played her violin. As this was almost constantly, many of the other tenants in her building were an almost constant audience for her, and she treated her practices in her apartment as performances unto themselves. After all, that’s what her constant practice was; a performance where the audience was behind walls of drywall and wiring instead of a stage.
Driving through the rainy darkness, Vanessa’s mind was troubled. Halfway through the first movement of the piece that she had performed, she had fallen behind by one sixty-fourth of a beat. No one noticed, of course; Vanessa’s skill for covering her incredibly few mistakes was incredibly good. The reason that this rarely-used talent was that the musician had berated herself for at least a good hour agonizing over what she could have done in preparation for that one split second to overcome that incredibly small error.
This tiny mistake, however, ruined the performance for Vanessa. Her eyes narrowed as she began her usual hour or two of self-ridicule for the mistake that she should have known would come. ‘I only practiced that passage for seven hours! How could I have thought that I would have been able to complete that passage without screwing up as I always do during one of my performances?’ Now, Vanessa almost never made mistakes that anyone, including herself, knew about, but the young woman had always believed that she did error in some way, shape, or form, and she always let herself remember that.
As she parked her car in the complex garage and took the elevator up to her ninth floor apartment, Vanessa wasn’t surprised to see tears come to her eyes. Sniffing her nose and attempting to hold back the tears, the young woman strode, pose straight, to her apartment door. As soon as she unlocked the door and entered, she bolted for her bedroom, letting the door slam shut behind her. Falling onto her bed, allowing the tears to fall freely, Vanessa sobbed into her covers. Allowing all of the shame of what she considered her tragic mistakes to leave her through her nightly crying sessions, Vanessa felt the cumulative weight of all her failures and mishaps throughout her musical career grow on her by yet another mass tonight. There had been a prominent member of the musical community at the recital tonight, and he must have heard her blunder! Her wails grew again as she cringed in another bout of shame and humiliation for something that she thought to be a grave bungle on her part that could have easily been corrected with another four hours or so of hard, non-stop practice.
Cursing herself once more as she wracked more shame upon her person, Vanessa’s sobs grew deeper and more pronounced as she came to a realization that had been hidden from her for her entire life. The music that she had slaved her entire life, sacrificing everything for, didn’t want her. That was the reason that she continually failed at her eternal pursuit of perfection. Even though Vanessa had forsaken friends, family, and everything else that would have ensured a content, wonderful life; the music didn’t want her. If music were a tangible object that she could covet and possess, she had sold it at some garage sale of bygone days and not even realized that she had done so. The destiny, the purpose of her life had been to become the greatest musician that anyone had ever seen, and she continually failed at even, in her mind, simple tasks as keeping on beat.
"You have failed, Vanessa."
Her eyes bulging, the young woman spun around, her eyes red from all of her sobbing. Standing before her was someone shrouded in darkness, his face invisible to her eyes, although there was a light pointed directly at the figure’s face. Backing up in panic, Vanessa found her back to the headrest of her bed. Stammering, she asked the visitor what he wanted. Advancing towards her without actually moving from his position, the black shape loomed over the violinist. "You have failed, Vanessa. For attempting to master my intricacies, you shall pay dearly."
Just as Vanessa thought that the horrible, black figure was going to consume her in some grotesque display of something terrible, she woke up. Glancing at the bedside clock, she noticed that the time registered half-past four in the morning. As the half-asleep woman tried to wake up, the horrible dream that had been haunting her nightly for the past…well, ever since she could remember. There was not a night that went by where Vanessa could sleep peacefully without the black specter of whatever it was that hid itself in the dark corners of Vanessa’s subconscious, clawing its way out every night into the realm of her dreams.
Even if she was a half an hour earlier than usual, the young woman decided to begin her usual music practice in preparation for her next performance, in a few days. She would be performing another exquisite piece that she had memorized three days prior, and ‘mastered’ the day before the recital that she had botched with that one off-beat of a sixty-fourth second.
Her sobs began anew when she realized that someone important would be at her next recital, wherever it was. Vanessa never really cared about where she would have to travel; all that mattered was that she played her music and made the audience happy. Even that latter point, in fact, was trivial; the only truly relevant act was that Vanessa played her music. The music had given her family when hers was too busy to even acknowledge her. The music had given her friends when all were too entrenched in matters as trivial and happiness and friendship. The music…was everything to Vanessa. It was her entire life.
After all this time, Vanessa had come to realize that her entire life was now useless. The music didn’t want her anymore; how could she play? It was like asking a dog to perform tricks that refused to do what you say. The only problem with this analogy is that Vanessa wasn’t sure which was the master and which was the rebellious pet; was she, the musician, simply a conduit for the music itself? An obedient pet that would advertise for the entity that she had given everything in her life for, with no thought as to her own desires, her own dreams?
Perhaps that was the way it was meant to be; the Music dictating where she would go, what she would eat, who she would entertain, and Vanessa being the ever-obedient, servant-girl to the music that owned her. No longer was what Vanessa played her music, but the reverse; Vanessa was the music’s.
The young woman’s sobs began anew as she fell to the ground, another fit of sobs wrenching her frail body, weak from malnutrition. For the past few months or so, Vanessa had discovered that the "flaws" in her performance had been becoming progressively worse, and she continued to practice as often as she could. However, this new addition to her schedule forced her to skip meals increasingly often, causing her already fragile health to be stretched to the breaking point.
In fact, that is exactly how the young woman felt. She was an obsolete piece of trash, merely the means to an end for the action for which she had slaved under these many years. Wiping the tears away from her face, only to have new ones take their place, Vanessa walked over to the bathroom, leaving the violin and bow on the floor. Looking into the mirror, the musician gazed at the reflection for hours, merely staring into the depths of the reflection’s eyes. For years, Vanessa had failed to do something as simple at glance at herself for any significant span of time; after all, that was time that she could have better been spent practicing her music. Wait, that’s not right. The music could have better spent that time being played by her. It never was "her" music, after all. The music had captivated her, possessing her with its siren’s song of freedom and reward for a job well done.
Now, gazing into the reflection of a person that she had never seen in over 20 years, Vanessa felt something that had lain dormant resurface. Perhaps it was the childlike curiosity that she had sacrificed along with everything else in her life; perhaps it was the teenage schoolgirl, anxious to explore the world with bright and optimistic eyes. In either case, something had returned that the young woman had lost at some point in her life. No, she knew exactly when she had lost that intangible feeling of sparkle and life; it was the moment she had picked up that cursed violin and ran the bow across its strings.
Her listless face had ended its bout of depression and now settled on a new emotion: anger. Anger at the music that had cost her everything up until now, anger at her parents who ignored her, anger at her ‘friends’ who abandoned her, anger at herself for believing in such devotion to…to…that.
The anger was an emotion that she had never truly felt before. The last time that Vanessa had felt anger, or any other true emotion for that matter, she had been too young to comprehend its true meaning. Now, nearly free of the bonds that chained her to the music that held her, the woman felt the surge of power and authority to do what she pleased that accompanied that feeling.
Exiting the bathroom, Vanessa gazed at her apartment with new eyes, the anger fading rapidly. The dusty shelves that had never been used, the scarcely utilized kitchen, everything. Her entire apartment was a reflection of her life; with the exception of one tiny and irrelevant portion, her entire existence was one hulking collector of dust.
No more, she vowed silently. No more would she be a captive to music, it being her one all-consuming goal. Rushing to the bedroom, Vanessa returned into the main room with the only large, blunt object that she could lift in her exhausted position: a bedside lamp. Standing above the violin and bow that she had tossed carelessly aside, she smiled with triumph, victory, and satisfaction as she slammed the lamp down upon the violin with all of her strength. The fragile instrument cracked and split into dozens of pieces as the heavy lamp fell upon it, the wood splintering and flying off at odd angles.
Falling to her knees, Vanessa began to cry once more. However, these tears were not of hopelessness and despair as she had cried for earlier; these were tears of joy and hope. The shattering of the violin, the destruction of the most cherished and hated object of her life, caused revitalization within Vanessa more powerful than the simple experience of true emotion that she had felt only a few moments prior. Raising the lamp in triumph once more, Vanessa brought the heavy ceramic object upon the bow which had caused her to become a slave to the music as much as the instrument itself.
After participating in this brutal activity for a few minutes more, an exhausted Vanessa crawled into her bedroom, fell upon her bed, and slept.
For the first time that she could ever remember, Vanessa’s dreams were no longer nightmares that fateful night.
