Game of Many Lives

Fourth Life

My next life, the fourth, was much more pleasant.

I was born to a somewhat wealthy family, and taught to play the piano from an early age.

I loved it.

It felt like breathing. Without it, I'm sure I would've suffocated.

I was a natural pianist, reknowned as a prodigy.

For the first time in one of my lives my parents were proud of me. I was elated, however; my older sister became jealous. One day she couldn't take it any more and took a large needle to my eyes. I tried to fight back, but failed.

---The image of her rage, the needle, and the feeling as it robbed me of my sight is still vivid in my memory.

There are times even in my present life it visits my dreams and I have to turn the light on, just to be sure I can still see everything just fine.---

My parents punished her for it. They took her to a mental asylum for her violent outburst and I never heard from her again. I suppose she was left there to rot. I felt a little sorry for her, to be thrown away like that, despite what she had done to me.

Despite my blindness, I continued playing the piano. It didn't even seem harder without being able to read the sheet. It seemed easier, in fact. All I had to do was listen, and move my fingers to the next key, and release the next sound.

Without my eyes music became my entire world.

So much so that I often forgot to eat and sleep. It worried my parents, they didn't want to lose another child to madness. They brought a doctor to me, and he tried to convince me to remember to eat, and sleep, they were all worried I might be depressed. I wasn't. Not that they believed me. They tried for months to get me to take better care of myself, it was hard on them, I knew without seeing their faces.

The harder they pressed me, the more I hid in my music.

The less I ate, the less I slept.

The more I heard rumors that I might leave "before my time".

I was 20 then, I'd already had a life shorther than this one. I wasn't scared.

I remember the frustration as it kept becoming difficult to focus on the piano, I kept getting dizzy, or fainting.

I hated that almost as much as I had hated my brothers previously.

I started to notice my thinness by how my clothes draped so loosely over my skin and I began to cooperate to the best of my ability with the doctor and my parents good intentions. It took awhile, a long while, actually, before they all unanimously decided that I was "cured". The doctor left, and my parents were happy that their only son was finally healthy again.

Shortly after, I met a woman with the most beautiful voice I've ever heard. I fell in love with her, and we married before a year had passed.

I loved to hear her sing almost as much as I loved to play the piano.

It was wonderful. I still remember the song she sang every morning, and the lullabies she sang our three children to sleep with, as clearly as if she were next to me right now. I remember our second daughter take after her and sing with her, every morning after her fifth birthday. I remember my older daughter taking up the violin, and playing it beautifully. My son, the oldest, made me a proud grandfather at thirty-nine. I can remember the first time my grand-daughter said "grampa". There were so many smaller things inbetween as well, like the smell of my wife's cooking, or the clean laundry, the warmth of the fire on cold nights where we either sang as a family or told stories.

This life ended happily.

I died of old age, like in my first, but this one had been far from boring.

It had been sweet.