Excerpt from Chapter One:

If music were wind, I would live in a hurricane. If it were a mother, I would sleep in her soothing womb. If I were music, I would simply be me. I'd shroud my existence in a monsoon. But I am not music, even though my name, Melody, suggests I could be. The closest I get to ‘being' music, is playing it, living it, embracing it as if it were the organ most vital to survival. I might say it was my heart. But no... I can't give it a name, because it's more like a sixth sense.

Music is the shadow of thought.

A muse for grief.

An unending moan.

A manic pandemonium that roams through rhyme and mimics my soul through mime. It masquerades selfish woes, masks my hollow lifestyle like warm humming cellos. It's a blend of folly and secretive gen, acoustic vignettes—motionless, yet moving.

Music is not meek; it's neurotic like me. An eternal vessel for pain that must be voiced and heard, but can't reach its desired destination because it is trapped in the skin of a four-minute tune. Because of this time limit, I reject the constant sorrow I feel for abandoning my guitar in a corner of my bedroom. If only a song could last my lifetime, then I wouldn't have to listen to that slice of silence, of domesticity, that makes me forget how much music means to me.

Now I'm a career woman—a mother, a wife, a ‘happy' homemaker—who lives a socially acceptable existence. Like a metronome. Tick. Tick. Tick. No dynamics, just monotonous responsibility. But between the octaves I play over and over in my mind, every day, and the struggle to push my need to play guitar out of mind and get on with the life I chose to pursue, is the scent of reviving this need for music in my life; of understanding where this true love for music stems from and embracing the path I desire to follow. It's time to dust off my lonely guitar and press my fingertips into its strings so hard that they mould around them. It's time to live as if I were music , and if music were wind . It's time to live in a hurricane.

 

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