You Can’t Play on Broken Strings

This morning I went down to the basement, and pulled out two dusty black cases. I slung the soft one with the strap over my shoulder, and carried the hard body of the other in my hand. I took them upstairs, and looked at them, like two old, faithful companions that I had not seen in ages. Dusty, but exactly the same. Well, almost. I sorted through the pocket of the soft case, pulling out remnants of a past life, taking me back to half a lifetime ago. I unzipped the case, and there it was; intact, remaining. A gift my father gave me on my 15th birthday, over 16 years ago. I pulled it up on my knee, stroked the strings, and listened to the out-of-tune voice that rang out. It resounded like a faded memory – dear, albeit fuzzy. A smile crossed my face. My fingers fumbled around the strings for a few brief moments, until they burned and my wrist began to ache. The notes slipped my mind, and the muscle memory wasn’t where it was supposed to be.
It was a strange experience, almost out of body. These were not my hands, fumbling as though it were the first time, lost for how to make the music come together. These could not be my hands; I was a musician, and good one at that. How could they not remember? I looked at the impressions the strings left on my fingers, like a wound on fresh, uncallused skin. These could not be my hands.
I cracked open the hinges of the hard case, thinking back to what a gift this had been to me, back when I was a teenager. A different brand, a different beauty. This one gave me a new opportunity to study. And there it was, the cracked, golden finish the same as it had always been, with two broken strings in the middle. I felt just like that guitar; unchanging in form, and yet broken in the the middle.
There is such a great divide between the heart; the person who has remained unchanging inside, and what has become of my outsides. I feel like I am living inside someone else altogether. Too much time has gone by, too much has eroded, and it has left me to start so many things in my life again from square one.
These last four years have swallowed me up and spit me out broken, and now I am left to put all the pieces back together. Sometimes I feel lost, and I want to hide my face from the idea of how much strength I need to build back. So much strength is gone from my body, from my hands. But I know that if I don’t fight to get it back, I will lose something far more than muscle – I will lose the beauty of the things that I used to love, the things that made me tick. The things that made me…me.
So even though I am picking up the pieces of a broken life, stuck somewhere between who I used to be, and who I have become, I refuse to let the hard things that have happened to me take away the things I love most. This experience today, picking up those beautiful, dusty instruments and fumbling around, it reminded me of a life that I let go of, but one that is not lost completely. It was not easy to pull out those black cases, and face the broken music, but it is time to clean up, re-string, build some new calluses, and let the music awaken again. Cause you know what? You can’t play on broken strings.