It sounds like freedom.
Every morning, I wake up at 5:47 AM. Not 5:45, not 5:50. The precision keeps the anxiety at bay. I brush my teeth, tie my hair back with a black elastic that leaves a dent in my ponytail, and walk to the conservatory while the city of Tokyo is still soft and gray. I do not listen to music on my headphones. I listen to the rhythm of the train tracks. Clack-clack, pause. Clack-clack, pause. I count the rests. ichika matsumoto pov
I raise my bow.
Tonight is the audition for the National Youth Orchestra. The soloist chair. The one my mother missed when she was seventeen. I am not playing for glory. I am playing to close a loop in my mother’s timeline. She lives in the past, in the measure she failed. I am her repeat sign, her second attempt at the cadenza. It sounds like freedom
I am seventeen, and I have never held a boy’s hand. Last week, a boy from the literature club, Tanaka, tried to talk to me in the library. He had kind eyes and a paperback copy of Soseki. He asked if I ever got lonely, practicing alone in the soundproof room until midnight. The precision keeps the anxiety at bay
They are not wrong. I don’t eat lunch. Not because I am starving myself for vanity, but because when I eat, the blood rushes to my stomach, and my hands get warm, and the calluses soften. If my hands are soft, I cannot feel the strings. If I cannot feel the strings, I am nobody.
I lower my violin.
