Burning Doves//Matthew Murdock

4

And it continued happening.

Every other day, a small scrap of paper would slide discretely under her door, containing a new piece for her to play.

She began to look forward to those moments.

When, for once, Emma knew she wasn't playing to deaf ears.

When she wasn't playing for parents who hardly cared or family who tired easily.

They weren't artistic, her family, they dealt with numbers and facts and things of importance.

At least important to them, Emma could hardly care.

To her, the numbers were a confusing jumble of strange equations waiting for her to piece together.

A puzzle she could never solve.

She didn't get the brains, her sister did, she got the words that jumbled up incomprehensibly in front of her and algorithms she couldn't understand.

She got tutors upon tutors, each dedicated to raising her performance level, but none worked.

And with each failed grade, with each disappointed look, Emma retreated farther back into her shell.

That was when she found music, art, that was when she found the place she excelled.

That was the place she belonged.

Finding meaning behind the abstract, finding beauty beyond the simplicity.

And most of all, music, she found music.

She found an untouched world within the notes, bursting with life, living in a way she could never possibly understand.

New reaches of the universe she could hardly fathom, twists and turns of darkness and light intertwined in a dangerous dance.

A beautiful world, an untouchable world.

And just as she found it, it was taken from her.

It was taken from her with every empty seat at her recitals, with every half hearted glance at her painting.

They could hardly care.

They only cared that Emma wouldn't be going to Harvard or Yale.

They only cared that she wouldn't be living in an expensive house in an equally expensive neighborhood.

At a young age, Emma saw this, she saw their begrudging looks as they paid for her lessons.

Heard their long sighs as they bought her new supplies.

She was the black sheep.

So, just as she found it, she gave it up.

And she tried, oh, how she tried.

She tried to understand the equations and numbers, she tried to understand the jumbled words.

But she never quite got enough.

And with each disappointed glance, she sank further in the pit.

A pit of pain and self pity.

A pit where only the broken lived.

And that was what she was, broken.

So she buried herself in the ocean of her failure.

She buried herself in the pinch of the needle and the endless high that would follow.

She buried herself because then she felt that she could survive.

Walking emotionless with gaunt cheeks and stooped shoulders.

An empty shell, and they hardly noticed.

Until it was too late, and she was seeing the red and blue flashes above her pass in a hazy blur.

When she woke up a while later in the plain white of a hospital room, alone.

They hadn't spoken to her since.

Sending money, first for rehab, then for her to move out and live somewhere else.

Covering the tracks of her mistakes, sending her as far away from them as they could.

Their shame followed her wherever she went.

But not now.

Because now, she realized, ears were listening.

Here, in the harshest of cities, people were caring.

And every other night, she would see evidence of this at her doorstep. 

Hello! It's been ages, and I'm really, really sorry.

BUT I'M BACK NOW.

I wanted to give a little more of a glimpse into Emma's backstory before things start to heat up.

And if you happen to read any of my other works, I promise I am trying my hardest to get more chapters written.

I've fallen out of my schedule, man, it's rough.

SO BEAR WITH ME.