Music for my Soul by Yehor Boichenko

“Okay, so what happened next?”

asked Dr. Dolly.

“I don't remember. I mean, then I woke up and…everything was gone...what could this mean?”

“Hmm, you see, there can be many options here. For example, something may bother you so much that it completely takes away all your feelings and leaves you with emptiness. Listen, maybe you need to occupy yourself with something. When was the last time you did something that you like? Any hobbies?”

Simon looked at Dr. Dolly in silence.

“You do have hobbies, don’t you?”, asked the psychologist anxiously.

Simon thought about it. He used to like many things. He danced, painted, photographed... but at some point, all of this became useless.

“Yeah, of course. Even more than one”, he answered briefly.

“Oh, well, you see, it's already something. What exactly did you do? And why did you never mention it?”

“Well, it was so long ago and… and I don’t think that it was related to the topic I came to you with”.

Silence in the room.

“You know,” the doctor said calmly to Simon, “I think you should go back to your favourite activities. At least, you should try. I'm sure you'll like it."

The clock on the wall struck five. The weekly session has ended.

 ***

Simon walked into the room and sat by the window. It was dusk, so the light rays of the sun illuminated the room. He heard that the city was calming down after a difficult, hard-working day. Simon sat and looked out the window. “Ok, whatever, I'll give it a try”, thought Simon while walking over to the bedside cabinet. He took out paints and tried to draw a picture. “I need to give in to my emotions and not pay attention to everything around me”, he told himself.

At one point it even seemed to him that something good was starting to come out, but the result was not entirely pleasant. The drawings turned out to be uninteresting, sad, and soulless. Simon was starting to get annoyed. Drawing had always been a way for him to calm down, and the fact that this time the effect was different annoyed him even more.

He put the brush aside and sat down on the couch. Suddenly, he noticed a box with old things near the TV, which he had wanted to throw away for a long time. The box was large with a bunch of old children's paintings on it. “Why is it still here?!”, he thought. In fact, Simon could have thrown it away right now, but something told him he should take another look at it. 

In the box were old t-shirts, notebooks from his school days, as well as cassettes, which Simon and his friends went to buy in one of the local shops. Most of them did not have stickers, so it is almost impossible to understand what was on them. Besides, Simon wasn't interested at all. “It's all in the past”, he said, “let it be in the past”. However, one cassette did interest him. The word “Concert” was written on it. At that moment, there was a feeling that everything around stopped. The commotion on the street subsided, and the room plunged into darkness.

Simon walked back to the closet. On the last shelf, there was an old violin. He carefully opened the case, which was fully covered with dust so that it seemed as if the instrument had not been touched for a hundred years. He took out his bow and carefully tested the strings. Surprisingly, the instrument still sounded clean. 

Simon walked back to the table and tried to play one of the old tunes he'd learned back in the days. He carefully drew the bow and the pleasant sound of the violin swept through the room. He wrote the music himself, and at one time his teacher liked it very much. 

Simon felt that there was only him and his instrument at this moment. He started playing. A loud and enchanting melody sang in the room, which was almost immersed in the sunset. The music grew louder, and Simon, eyes closed, circled the room.

Simon played, danced, and laughed loudly. If someone had seen him from the outside, they would have thought that he had lost his mind, as the loud and somewhat eerie laughter that echoed through the room was frightening and mesmerizing at the same time.

He ran to the window and placed the violin on the windowsill. "Finally, finally I'm free!" the man shouted out the window. With a loud scream, the violin wobbled and fell into the darkness. Simon looked happily into the night sky.