'Til The Final Notes

The cold lobby buzzes with eager anticipation as students, staffs, and professors gathered around the registration booth, claiming their tickets to watch the upcoming and long-awaited Battle of the Bands. There were familiar and strange faces in the sea of strangers, expressing and vocalizing their excitements altogether. While some found their seats, others remained standing around, creating a crowd. Perhaps it was out of courtesy, but many offered their seats for professors, even for female students, whilst the area on the side of the stage was reserved for the bands.

A fever of thrill and exhilaration spreads through the audience as the hosts roars the start of the event, flooding everyone with excitement as they screamed for their teams to be crowned the winners of this elimination round. The loud noise was never my interest, though as someone carrying a high role within the team, an appearance as an outside observer was necessary in case of emergencies.

Under the soft glow of the stage lights, the keyboard rests, and a familiar face comes onstage to bask on the light of dawn. His skilled and practiced fingers hovered over the keys like a bird poised for flight before they pressed on, letting a song emerge sharp yet delicately. It was a tune that even someone who has long despised music, decided to listen to. A chime that commanded the room, breaking through the noise, and weaving together souls. And though his lips remained shut, his every movement created a story born from passion and enjoyment.

His fingers danced on the keys as if he had danced in this stage a thousand times. While the music rises, cascading, and breaking through all walls, I had my breath held tight, listening as my ears hear differently. My eyes, which had taken his form to be but simple, now gleams as the music bends and curls, creating a new form of beauty, one that captures the beauty in his art.

"It's just a sensitivity response-" as if those words could soothe the pain of every clashing discordant. Music was never meant to be more than a noise to me, nothing but sharp and dulled, scraping pathways in my mind that taught me to hate it, to despite it, to fear the way that it would tighten my chest and quicken my pulse, teaching my body to rebel against its existence.

A world without music was my safe place: Predictable, secure, a canvas that can only be disrupted by the scratch of my pen against a sheet of paper. And I swore to myself to never breach that safety gifted to me, never to let the discord shake me up once more.

So why am I still here?

Why does the hammering vibration of the drums come deaf to me? The high notes of the vocalist vanished without a living trace? Leaving behind only the resonance of a keyboard that ran down my spine, waking me from my core? The silence, which was once my fortress, undisturbed by the chaos of sound, was reached, falling so simply as if mocked.

And yet, no knife had pierced through my carefully guarded walls, but words from a heart spoken not in sharp edges, but in the soft and delicate cadence. Maybe it was the feeling of betrayal that made me chuckle bitterly, or perhaps I had feared what could be loved for too long, that I found it hard to place such a bittersweet moment somewhere within me—anywhere, in fact.

His notes that embraced me, whispered in a soft and foreign language, cradling me in a sea of music unfamiliar to the person I became, dug deep, resonating in the hollow places that I kept hidden for as long as I could. It was as if the music he brought carried a part of him, carried his story. And I, a mere writer, was fortunate enough to become an audience of this beautiful scenery, one that will surely be forevermore, etched in my heart.