It’s always hard to look back on your life. The failures, the emotions, and the complex threads of life that were so devastating when you were in them are unwoven from their quilt and laid side-by-side. What was once a spider-wed suddenly becomes a neat, rectangu-lar blanket that makes sense. And once everything is undeniably clear, you are faced with the unwavering fact of your own ignorance, and you can’t help but think that in twenty years from now you’ll look back on your mid-life in the same way as you look on your youth now.
Everyone is dealt a hand of struggles in high school, and the gods seemed to deal to me an unfortunately bad one. I was sixteen, naive, and drowning in life without realizing it. I can still see myself: A skinny, weak teenager sitting at a lunch table by himself and con-vincing himself that he enjoyed high school to numb out the pain that he didn’t. Things are more bearable when we lie to ourselves.

I was smart, not attractive but not ugly, and lost in the com-plexity of my emotions that I had convinced myself I understood. My sister’s best friend, Hannah Vice, sat across the lunch room with her friends, and I’ve always wondered whether she ever noticed me star-ing at her. I never spoke, and I seemed to have unknowingly brokered a deal with everybody at school that ensured that if I never spoke up and never bothered anybody, I would be left alone.

Home was slightly different from school, though not much. I remained quiet, and only talked to my parents when they said some-thing to me that required more than a grunt for an answer. I spent most of my time in my room, quickly doing homework and then wast-ing my free time with useless books and Internet surfing.

The one exception to all of this was my violin. I found the violin in seventh grade when I was wandering around in my grandparent’s attic. It was a musty, cold place, like one of those basements that seems to turn every shadow into a black de-mon plastered onto the wall. There was no light except from one boarded-up window that blocked all but one sliver of sunlight from shining into the room.

I knew when I walked into the attic that I wasn’t supposed to be there. My grandparents had never told me it was off-limits, but the feeling of the room, the cold poking at your skin and the darkness caressing your face, undoubtedly proved that it was. If my grandparents hadn’t banned the room, God himself did.
So there I was, an innocent seventh-grader, wandering around the attic, looking inside cardboard boxes and under piles of old, torn blankets. Beneath a pile of blankets, as if it was trying to hide, I dis-covered a long black violin case. Within the first three seconds of looking at it, I knew that I had discovered the attic’s crowned jewel.

I got on my knees, bowing in worship to the violin, and I care-fully unzipped the case. Inside rested the instrument, in all of its feigned glory. It was made of a dark, rich maple wood, and had a polish that simultaneously absorbed all of the attic’s light yet at the same time absorbed none of it. The light that escaped the violin’s grasp, reflecting off of the wood, was eternally tainted, as if it had been painted over with a thick coat of black.

I couldn’t resist.

I wasn’t a seventh grader who was very rebellious, but even in silence, the violin exuded a unique Siren song that made it all but irre-sistible. I picked the devil out of its case and plucked one of its string.

The Siren song got stronger.

The attic may have somehow had amazing acoustics, but the resonance of that instrument has only ever been outdone by that of a church organ that I had heard earlier that year at Christmas. I held the magnificent wood in my palms, almost caressing it, and I believe it was at that point that my virgin innocence was swept away in one co-lossal act of rape. I put the instrument back, zipped up the case, and brought it downstairs to show my grandparents.

I don’t remember my grandpa’s reaction, but my grandma’s eyes seemed to widen into horror, as if I had just found a dead body she had successfully hidden upstairs for the past twenty years. I opened the case in front of them, my grandma wincing at my every pluck of the strings, and they agreed to give me the violin after seeing my adoration of it. Looking back, I don’t think my adoration bought me the instrument so much as my grandmother’s hatred of it.

The next few years rushed past me in one blurred streak. Sev-enth, eighth, and ninth grade all ticked away in the grandfather clock of life, and it was the speed at which they ticked that concealed my downward spiral. Most of my friendships faded away, usually due to my unwillingness to take time away from violin to pursue friendships. Had I been watching, I could have detected the ever-so slowly wid-ening distance between me and all other humans, but I was so focused on my destination that I didn’t notice my colossal loneliness until I stared up at the ceiling at night and realized that there was nobody in the sky or on Earth who I had a true relationship with.

The next morning after that revelation, a Sunday, the first thing I did was play my violin. I had been practiced repetitively the prior three years, even worked myself up to first chair in the school orchestra, but it wasn’t until that morning when our relationship truly began. I gave up the last few remnants of life that I possessed and instead dedicated myself to the dance of the violin. The following school day someone came up to me and offered me a joint to smoke, which I would have taken if the high of the violin hadn’t proven itself immensely more satisfying.

For almost two years, until the middle of eleventh grade, my life was consumed by my violin and the hours of daily practice it required. I swirled around in the hurricane of life for those two years, wholly out of control of myself, and it was only my violin which al-lowed me to remain in the illusion that life was going well. I wish I had never found that violin. It brought long eras of joy and happiness, but when my life quaked with suffering, like in those two years, that delicate wooden instrument became the rock I stood on for stability. And fragile wood is never something to trust in. Every time I played music, the violin did a worse and worse job of curing my illness. It helped, but every practice it helped less. I clung to its music and my playing, practicing for hours and hours, feeling less and less of an escape, all hoping that the next time would be different and the violin would once again seem sufficient to solve my struggles. Like it had in the beginning.
Left to myself, I would have never given up my clutch on the violin’s cold wood. I truly hated the instrument, but always found myself going back to it. I felt that if I lost that resonant music, I would be losing a slice of my own soul.

My car crash forced the violin from my dying hands. Literally. I was driving home from school, my violin resting in its case on the passenger seat, when another car sideswiped me. My car crossed an-other lane and hit a guard rail, with glass shattering and my engine igniting into flames.

Even now, some forty years later, I can still feel the shattered windshield’s glass on my torso as I dazedly looked at my own shat-tered life cutting into my thighs. But most vividly, I remember the weight of the violin case. In the crash, the case had been uprooted and launched onto my chest, and in those few moments of panic, when it felt like I might actually die, that violin case turned to a black weight that had trapped me to my seat.

I threw my arms onto the case, trying to pry it off of my chest but finding that it was stuck between my leg and the dashboard. The case didn’t move, and as much as I clawed for my own freedom, I was helpless. The entire world was smoky, I was half unconscious, and the fire from the car’s engine was slowly beginning to consume the interior.

And then-rapture. Two outstretched muscular arms wrapped around me and pulled me from my seat. They laid me on a path of grass adjacent from the highway, forcing me to look up to the skies and clouds.

 
He was not at all magnificent. He was burned, had scratches from windshield glass up and down his arms, and blood was pooling at his wrists. He had messy hair, parched lips and seemed almost to be closer to death than I was (but I guess my perspective was slightly off at that time). But despite all of this, he was the most glorious sight I had ever seen.

My sight was hazy, but I still see one image of my mind, some forty years later: My bloody savior standing tall, blood pouring from his wrists and head, with the backdrop of the hellish car he had pulled me out of.

I think it was after I strained my neck to look once more at him that I bled out and died.