Memorycemetery

…about those days when I wanted nothing more than to be a concert pianist playing fifty concerts a year around the world…..

I was fourteen. And, some how playing those virtuosic pieces with all the sentimentality that was brimming out of my teenage self, I thought I knew what I wanted to do. I played those pieces composed centuries, decades ago with all my heart and passion, like no one else had. I played it my way. I brought listeners to tears. And a couple days after I turned sixteen, I left for London to music school. I thought that my life was made.

Technique, technique, technique… The physical-ness of being a musician. It really is identical to that of being a sportsman. Without the genes that guarantees height for a basketball-er, or the thighs and long calves of that of a sprinter, it doesn’t matter if you know at the bottom of your heart that your soul was meant to do what your body couldn’t do. I practiced nine hours a day, but I never had the fingers of some of my school mates who could rattle Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky without needing to practice more than an hour a day. After three years of doing all I could, literally breaking myself on the wall each day and night, I knew that what my heart sang and what I could do well were drastically different. I ended up in university majoring in Economics, some thing I could do with my eyes closed. I received top honors, but yet it was and still is a huge struggle to come to terms with the fact that what I love and excel in are two different things.

I treated myself to an iPod video today. As I was downloading music into this new iPod, I came across some of my old recordings of more than thirteen years. My heart was all there. It is another reality. Perhaps one that I have had hidden for too long but yet I am unable to revive. That memory is the silent part of my existence that will only be known to me and only me.

Bunny

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