There was once a girl who hated playing the piano. She hated it so bad that the despise made her taste ashes in food, made her zing with irritation and annoyance, made her see the world a shade darker under the stormy clouds of an inescapable chore.
But it did not matter what she felt because her parents thought she shone in music. Every time she threw a tantrum about it, her parents would remind her of the fees and how fortunate she was to have a chance to learn an instrument. Every time she threatened to quit, they would coax and persuade her to have another go, telling her that the beginning is always the hardest; that she would love playing the piano when she practiced enough and could play songs that she enjoyed.
I guess the little girl never did. Song lists were the dictation of the piano teacher, of the syllabus, of the audience present, as if she were a goddamn jukebox. Thus playing the piano remained just a command, an order, a chore, nothing more than a dead action.
The hatred of it cocooned her over the years, though the shell softened ever so slightly; playing the wooden block of an instrument became tolerable simply because that was one of the few things she surpassed her peers in school. She was always clustered by classmates who wanted to hear her play, to gawk at her fingers as she caressed the keys in a song she was forced to practice one too many times. So she played the piano, if only for the limelight and the surging feeling of being praised.
Then there came love; or what she assumed was love. High school saw the arrival of despicable subjects: physics, biology, chemistry, additional mathematics; the new enemies in an unprecedented war that allied her with music. She soon sought solace from the piano when the sciences frustrated her, when the numbers dumbfounded her. Sometimes she found the comfort she needed but more often than not, she did not, because the running notes of scales and the demanding technicalities of the pieces were an eyeful and took too much attention for her to dwell on the sweet sounds of the piano to be lulled back to serenity. Music was her voice but larynx of a piano always stayed loathingly silent; she wanted to play Westlife, Beatles, Kelly Clarkson, Jesse McCartney, and a mountain of songs that meant something to her, not impressive concertos that never crisscrossed her life.
So she turned to writing. It started with a journal of words that bespoke anger and hurt, of the qualms of an insignificant high school girl, of the people she would love to strangle. Then something happened. She realized she was no longer mute, just depressingly short of vocabulary and full of grammatical errors. But she could speak, sing even, and that mattered more than anything else in the world. And somewhere along the way, she fell in love with it; writing became the medium, the bridge that closed the gap between her train of thoughts and the stage of the world. Writing gave her the gift of expression and God knew her heart needed to do just that.
Soon playing the piano resumed its role as an obligation, an accursed step prior to lessons she could never enjoy.
Time flew, and when the time came for her to choose a career path, she said the saddest thing: I am going to pursue music. Because she knew the only other things she actually love doing were reading and writing, and reality wise, they would not ensure a sound future. People do not pay people to read; review books perhaps, which was not an option for full-time job. And the path she saw in writing was journalism and that did not strike well with her parents; not that it was an interesting field in the first place.
So music it was. Still is.
Not every story has a happy ending, but I am pretty sure this girl will find hers one day.
