Your Name Is Erik - Blog Posts

To say music is your life is an understatement. Music is what makes you wake up each day—albeit always in darkness. It’s the living substitute for the family and friendships your face, a damning accident of birth, has denied you.

Then one day you hear her voice from your desolate hiding place. You discover music personified in the form of a grieving girl just as lonely as you are. You can't explain why you took the risk of revealing yourself to her; you only know that there’s no meaning in music anymore without that seraphic voice in your possession. Molding it, controlling it, is your closest approximation to happiness.

It doesn’t end well. Your desire turns to a murderous obsession that nearly wrecks her. You forget that that messiness of the human heart is only partly transposed in the sheet music of an opera. She isn't music personified; she’s just a woman who belongs to the living world from which you're exiled. 

Still, she shows you compassion. For a moment she sees you. In that fleeting fraction of time, she understands you better than you've bothered to understand her in your relentless quest to own her. And so you release her. With one last goodbye, she returns the ring you gave her and your eyes follow her long after her form disappears from view.

You’ve accepted it. You nod your head in resignation and kiss the ring that once touched her fingers. You'll be brave! You’ll think of her fondly and savor the fragments of her that live in your mind's eye.

Then you hear her voice again: that call that first summoned you from the darkness; the instrument that shaped you as much as it was shaped by you; the melody on which you'd set all your wretched hopes. It possesses your body as usual. As it radiates down your spine, you react like a cobra to a charmer's flute. The angelic sound seems to await your response.

But your face crumbles when her rescuer sings back. In the notes of their duet you hear all the things you can't give her, all the grief you've caused, and the sure certainty that you've lost her forever. You hang your head and realize that you're not brave; you're sorry. So very, very sorry, and...

You love her. You love her desperately!