The silence backstage is a living thing. It has a weight, a texture, a cold and clammy skin that presses in on me from all sides. It’s the same silence that lives in the hollow space between my ribs, the one that’s been my constant companion since I first held a bow. They call it stage fright. A quaint, almost charming term for a monster that eats you from the inside out. My hands, slick with a cold sweat, clutch the neck of her violin. Not mine. Never mine. It’s still hers, saturated with the memory of her fingers, the ghost of her music sealed beneath a century of rosin and varnish.
The wood is a deep, impossible brown, like river-wet earth under a full moon. It smells of old paper, of pressed flowers, of a life I only half-remember. When they gave it to me, packed in its velvet-lined case, it felt less like an inheritance and more like a sentence. “She would have wanted you to have it,” my mother had said, her voice thick with unshed tears. What she meant was, *She would have wanted you to be like her.* And I am not. My grandmother was a fire, a storm of music that could fill a concert hall and leave the audience breathless. I am a flicker, a whisper, a melody trapped in a soundproof room.
A disembodied voice crackles over a hidden speaker, announcing my name. The sound is distorted, metallic. Each syllable is a hammer blow against my sternum. I can hear the polite, expectant applause from the other side of the curtain. It’s the sound of a thousand pairs of eyes turning towards this sliver of darkness, waiting. Waiting for me. For her. For the musician I am supposed to be.
My mind flashes back to a sun-drenched afternoon. I’m seven, maybe eight, sitting cross-legged on the Persian rug in her living room. The air is thick with the scent of lemon polish and the rich, dark notes of her playing. She isn’t performing; she’s just… talking. To the violin. Her eyes are closed, a faint smile on her lips as the bow dances across the strings, weaving a story I can’t understand with words but feel in the marrow of my bones. A story of forgotten lullabies from a country she left behind, of first loves and last goodbyes. When she finishes, the last note hangs in the dusty sunbeams like a captured soul. She opens her eyes, and they find mine. “The music is already inside you, little bird,” she’d whispered, her voice like crumpled silk. “This,” she said, tapping the violin’s body, “is just the key.”
But the lock is rusted shut. My own music is a tangled knot of fear. I practice for hours, my fingers finding the notes with mechanical precision, but my heart remains silent. The music is technically perfect and emotionally hollow. My instructors have said as much, in kinder, more academic terms. “You have the gift, Elara, but you hold it at arm’s length. You need to let go.” Let go? It’s the holding on that’s keeping me from shattering into a million pieces.
The stage manager gives me a pitying look and a thumbs-up. It’s time. My feet, leaden and disconnected from my body, begin to move. The journey from the wings to the center of the stage is the longest walk in the world. The light hits me first—a searing, clinical white that erases the audience, turning them into a single, breathing shadow. The heat from the lamps feels like a fever. I can feel their collective gaze, a physical pressure. My own breathing is a ragged, shallow thing in my ears.
I place the violin under my chin. The worn wood is cool against my skin. For a moment, it is an anchor in a churning sea of panic. I raise the bow, my arm trembling so violently I’m surprised I can even hold it. My mind is a blank page. The intricate sonata I spent months memorizing has evaporated, leaving behind only the humming terror. This is it. This is the moment I fail, the moment the flicker is finally extinguished.
I close my eyes, a desperate attempt to find the darkness of the wings again, to find that living silence. And in that self-imposed night, something shifts. It’s not a thought, not a memory, but a feeling. A resonance that starts in the wood pressed against my collarbone and spreads through me like a slow, warm current. A single, pure note blossoms in the quiet of my mind. It’s not from the sonata. It’s simple, melancholic, achingly familiar. A ghost note. The opening of the lullaby from that sun-drenched afternoon.
My fingers move without my permission. They find the note on the A string, and the bow, as if guided by an unseen hand, draws it out. The sound that emerges is fragile, trembling, but it’s real. It cuts through the sterile silence of the hall. Another note follows, then another, my hands weaving the forgotten melody from threads of memory and instinct. It’s her song. It’s the story of the dusty sunbeams and the Persian rug, of a love so deep it transcends even death.
The music isn’t hollow anymore. It’s filled with everything I am, everything I’ve lost. The fear is still there, a cold stone in my stomach, but it’s no longer the only thing. The melody wraps around it, cushioning it, transforming it. The song pours out of me—a torrent of grief, of longing, of a desperate, painful beauty. I am not performing. I am not even playing. I am remembering. I am letting go. The violin is no longer a key to a lock; it’s a conduit, a bridge between her world and mine. And for the first time, the music feels like my own. The little bird is finally singing.