trigger warning: suicide
I was seventeen when I stopped playing the violin for the first time. The ten years I’d spent tirelessly producing music that permeated the walls of my family’s living room plummeted into a vortex of unexplored ambiguity, disappearing into the cream colored drywall.
I am in the middle of packing away my instrument--its smooth wooden face stares back at me, a twinge of incredulity in its hollow eyes--when my father appears behind me, his aging fingers gently tracing the longitude of each metal string. Pale rosin dust falls onto his skin, and he shakes his head with a sense of resignation written across his face like discarded poetry. I expect him to say something: tell me that this was for the best, or perhaps, a part of him wished for me to keep the violin. I expect him to speak profoundly in the low tumble of his baritone voice, cracking with overdue grief and silent mourn, yet the air only further grows thicker with the weight of crushing silence.
I had lived my whole life hearing music, pouring from between corridors and around edges where two walls thrust together to form a sharply cut corner. My ears submerged themselves within an incessant state of dissonance: the cacophony of conjoined harmonies, separately mellifluous, had somehow morphed into a nebulous of discordant noise. The newfound silence was foreign to my ears, the soundless air eliciting a discomfort buried in my veins.
Everything that had built up to this point collapsed within a five foot radius around my still frame. Every song that haunted me whilst I slept, each note that pressed their intangible sounds into the pads of my fingertips, every performance that led me to regurgitation each time I tremulously stepped onto a wooden stage, my bones fracturing with the poundage of anxiety.
I glance down at my violin with another wave of neurotic worry curling in my organs. Only this time do I acknowledge the state of my violin: it is polished, but the wood is chipped at the edges, the laminated paint peeling from areas I constantly touched. The strings are too taut, the bridge misaligned, the instrument strung tightly with apprehension, as though it is holding its breath, waiting for me to overexert it until the strings break.
This violin was a gift from my mother on my fifteenth birthday. Her gentle eyes were lit with muted exuberance as she carefully watched me lift the fragile instrument from its casing, the smallest hint of a smile on her face as her pale skin wrinkled with the tenderness of maternity.
“You are giving away her gift,” my father says, wearing a frown of disapproval. His broken English only lengthens the extent of his disappointment.
There is a ripple of guilt that pulls at my muscles. “I can’t keep it forever,” I manage to murmur in response. “You never wanted me to keep it, anyway.”
He shakes his head again.
“Do you think you are doing the right thing?”
I don’t answer him. Instead, I let my finger run across the strings, my eyes drifting to our family piano: unoccupied for so long, dust has already accumulated on its surface. Empty, unseated.
///
At seven years old, my mother introduced me to the violin for the first time.
At that time, ten years ago, she was much younger; her skin was devoid of tenebrous depressions beneath her eyes and in her sullen cheeks, and her hair was just short enough to barely touch her shoulders. Her slender fingers placed the violin in my hands, a gleam of joy glistening in her round eyes.
“This is a violin,” she spoke in her immaculate Mandarin. “One day, you will be able to play well enough so we can perform together for the family.”
My mother was known to be a piano prodigy in her town in China. My grandmother told me tales of her unabating passion for producing classical music, describing the youthful excitement in which her small hands flew over a worn-down piano in their fifty square meter apartment. Her music filled the halls, leaking into the bedrooms and drifted into the kitchen. Her music drew the attention of neighbors, who lived just beyond the paper-thin walls of the apartment, and they would often visit my grandparents as they eagerly listened to the sound of a five year old girl playing the piano. My grandparents and their neighbors would cut fruit and gossip over boiling pots of green tea, all the while melodious music flooded the rooms.
My mother pursued her love for music years after, continuing to expand the scale of her audience from the neighbors next door to the neighbors’ friends and family, all struggling to thrust themselves into the small capacity of the worn apartment in order to merely faintly listen to the sound of my mother’s music. Her songs were the unity to a community of middle aged Chinese people, binding them together with their utter fascination with her talent. Her dexterity with the ivory keys were astonishing: unparalleled to an extent in which my grandparents enrolled her into a musical academy to further expand my mother’s reputation throughout China.
I had heard tales of her music filling vacant halls in the populous city of Beijing, of her music weaving through sidewalks and echoing into the buzz of pedestrian life. I had heard tales of concert halls filled to the ceiling with occupants, attuned to the sound of my mother’s hands adeptly pressing against the ivory-clad keys of a piano: one far better than the broken instrument at her old childhood apartment. Utilizing this new piano, all polished and brandished with a whisper of harmonious poignancy, her music went beyond diffusing through a worn-down apartment complex, instead reaching the ears of hundreds as they filled the arrays of cushioned seats in the concert hall.
When I was nine years old, my grandmother showed me a grainy photograph of my mother, at age twenty, performing for a crowd of strangers. My grandmother’s cold finger tapped against the image of a youthful woman seated behind a piano, her trained eyes focused and sharp, her face exuberant with the iridescent glow of passion, the ghost of a smile upturning at the corner of her lips. The photo was of poor quality, yet my mother’s face was unmistakable.
“You look so much like her,” my grandmother commented, poking the soft area of my forehead with a long fingernail. “It is as though my daughter’s blood runs within yours. Perhaps you will follow her footsteps.”
Despite the crushing weight of expectancy, I had somehow formed a deep love for the violin: there was just something about the strain of the grated strings pulling against the thick fibers of the bow that furnished me with tranquility. A sense of concentration that hums its honey-light cadence in my brain, fueling my veins with a type of unmatched fervor that could only be explained as genetic inheritance from my mother. The ample elation radiating from the heat of my cheeks after I performed matched in tandem with the desire of my heart; a desire to mirror my mother’s actions, perhaps in an attempt to seek a grapple of validation.
My desire to emulate her actions grew into an intense development of my relationship with music. Regardless of what my father thought about my new passion--he had always disapproved the idea of me being a musician--my mother easily usurped control into the palms of her calm, gentle hands, binding me to one private instructor to the next, printing out mass copies of sheet music and shoving them atop of creaky, unstable, plastic stands that toppled when the scroll of my small violin barely grazed its surface.
Our living room--the area in which I most frequently practiced--was filled with the sound of music within months of my introduction to the violin. My mother would stand behind my shoulder, carefully reading the notes on the sheet music with attentive eyes, all the while tenaciously observing the manner in which my fingers fought to keep the music from falling into utter cacophony. She would listen with her perfectly tuned ears and waited until the last note sunk into the density of the air to lecture me on my flaws, yet she spoke with such warmth and compassion that I could not seem to be frustrated by my mistakes.
At the end of every practice session, she would take me into her arms and beam, her eyes soft and her touch burning.
Each time I lifted my violin from its casing and hoisted it onto my collarbone, I thought about what my mother had told me the first time she’d handed me my instrument. About how she promised me that one day, when I practiced hard enough, we would perform a duet before our entire family, showing them what talent had been cultivated from a sheen of fine dust.
It was that thought that kept me moving forward.
///
The first time the mention of a future career was brought to my attention, I was twelve, sitting at our circular dining table with a bowl clasped in my hands. My father had inquired about what I had planned to do with my future as I grew older, his voice grave with solemnity as he stared at me beyond a tall pitcher of suanmeitang.
“I’ll keep playing the violin,” I responded so casually, blissfully unaware of the tragedy that stands behind every heavenly dream.
My father merely frowned, the wrinkles of disappointment bleeding through his thickening skin.
“Violin?” he spoke in Mandarin, his voice strung with tight disbelief, as though he was astonished by my answer. “Music won’t make good money. How are you going to support yourself financially?”
My hands froze, and I stared into the polished cavern of my bowl, the face of a bewildered twelve year old gazing back at me. My reflection shifted with a nerve of doubt.
“Why would you say that?” asked my mother with a hiss. “Don’t discourage her.”
“She needs to learn the truth,” he said firmly, shaking his head as the clink of his metal chopsticks scraped against his bowl. “She’s not like you at all: she won’t make it far in the music industry. Maybe ten years ago, but certainly not now.”
My mother’s face hardened, and I could tell she was deeply hurt by his words, for her frame stiffened and the demure gentleness in her cheeks vanished as her jaw rigidified with tacit coldness. My mother was a calm woman: her temper tamed, kept locked away within a part of her she had kept concealed from her family. She was never one to be frequently upset by matters easily quelled by poised conversation, albeit the overcast of shadowed vexation darkened her complexion with a clouded emotion I had yet to recognize.
But instead of raising her voice at him, like how I had expected, she looked away, as though she were to restrain herself from shouting.
“Say what you want, but it is those words that make so many children resent their parents.” she replied softly.
That night, she took me into her room and gently brushed the hair out of my face, ensuring that our eyes would meet. Her lips turned into a smile soaked in resigned melancholy, dejection percolating through her round, dimming, hickory colored eyes. The perpetual shine that had sojourned in her gaze began to cease for the first time, and the darkening shadows hanging subjacent to her eyes began to morph into existence.
“Don’t listen to what your father says,” the muted cadence of her voice ran with impoverished solace, as though exhaustion began to settle in her bones. “Do whatever your heart tells you. If you want to play violin, I will support you.”
“But Dad’s right,” I shook my head, fidgeting with my fingers as my nails dug shallow, crescent shaped depressions into my skin. A sting latched onto each laceration. “It won’t make any money.”
My mother sighed. “You are too young to think about money. Your father and I will support you regardless of what your future is.”
Doubt clamored in my heart, the raucous tremor of dubiety sinking into my veins, palpitating with the rhythm of my pulse.
“Are you sure?”
She nodded. It was a curt nod, dismissive and carried with it a rooted sense of conviction.
“Even if there are hardships, we will manage.”
///
My mother began to wilt soon after I turned fourteen.
Shadows morphed into melancholic caverns of hollow disk beneath her eyes, her skin blanching into thin, translucent layers of wax, the once perpetual glimmer in her gaze ebbing away into particles of void oblivion. She did not appear to be as youthful as she was before: her fingers were growing feeble with the weight of her augmenting agony, her voice dimming into whispers whenever she spoke.
I began to notice the patterns: how often our home grew silent on days in which I did not practice my violin, how the sound of piano music vanished in tandem with my mother’s gradual withdrawal. The dulcet melodies dissipated and fell deep within an unfathomable, intangible realm of inconspicuous noise. The silence grew monstrous, elevating itself until it breached the height of a harrowing enclosure, causing me to often asphyxiate on its utter distress.
There is a facet to the concept of silence that is unexplored, yet discomforting all the same. The sheer anxiety carried within the lack of noise, the twitchy and unpleasant perturbation in the stress of soundlessness. The act of striding across a tightrope, the path disorderly and elliptical and everything but safe.
When I asked my mother why she hadn’t been playing piano, she shook her head at me and fiddled with her cracked fingers, her porcelain skin overrun with fissures that leaked dried blood.
“I’m getting old,” she replied simply. “Passion tends to die out when you are older.”
I knew she was lying, by the way she would longingly gaze at our family piano from afar whilst her broken hands tended to the dishes. The way she would always dismiss herself from approaching the instrument, keeping her hands busy with chores and paperwork. The way she would distance herself from the living room, attempting to avoid the very sight of the piano, only to wind up in a continuous cycle of standing before its ivory keys, observing with dull attachment glossed over her gaze. Her fingers itched, I could tell, but never once did she bring herself to sit down.
It was then that I began losing interest in music as well. It brought a sort of nauseating anxiety from the accumulating pressure growing in my lungs like bleeding flowers, and I would be wrought with inundating fear with each new performance that forced me to step atop a vast stage overlooking rows upon rows of seats. My innate scopophobia would resurface, dismantling my body with convulsions as I forced myself to play--
it will all be over soon. it will be over.
the instrument I had once admired so deeply.
Dread began to spread to my organs like an infectious pathogen, eating away at my insides like acid. The act of performing soon grew perilous in my eyes: a bleak and disfigured image of horror and anxiety, relentlessly haunting my fingers with the fear that all of this would be for nothing. That all of the performances, the practices, the hopes and dreams I had envisioned from the start would decompose into futility, that everything I worked for would diminish and retreat into my skin like a horrid curse.
What was the purpose of pursuing the violin if my mother did not continue to play the piano? I began to wonder if she had lied to me all of those years ago, if the words she had whispered to me were insignificant nothings that led me to grow falsely enraptured within a world I wished to exit.
I began to fear that my mother, the prodigy, would lose her passion and bring shame upon her grandiose history.
However, I had once caught her playing at midnight. I was beguiled by the faint sound of our family piano releasing patterns of familiar notes, lifting me out of my tousled bed and causing my careful footsteps to carry me into the hallway. I crept down the stairs silently, as to not produce any disruptive noise, and attentively watched my mother lose herself within her own domain of detachment: a world suffocated with music, and her passion smoldered through the threads of her thin wool cardigan like an indomitable flame. Golden and red with plaintive emotion.
There is a line between being tranquil and being furious with sorrow. That line duplicated itself across the surface of my mother’s face until she was nothing but lines and lines of maddened poetry.
I would not hear nor see her play the piano until my fifteenth birthday, when she gifted me a brand new violin with a muted smile on her face. She encouraged me to unzip its casing in front of the attendants of my party, excitedly recording my reaction to her gift on her cellphone. I was simply besieged by the thought of her gift itself, my mouth agape in shock and wondering when music had so prominently reappeared in her life, for it seemed as though the concept of music nearly faded from her thoughts entirely.
Proven wrong, I positioned my mother’s gift on my collarbones and asked her if we could play together.
Her eyes shot wide, filmed over with surprise, as though she had long forgotten the promise we made all of those years ago. But she swallowed thickly, briefly glanced at the party attendees--who were nodding eagerly with enticement--and smiled at me the same way she did in the past. Her eyes softened, and for a moment, I believed my mother’s old self reappeared within the residence of her frame, possessing her aging body and gazing at me through the glistening eyes of her once passion-ridden persona.
She agreed, and we performed a duet before my friends and their parents. They were an audience that widely differed from the ones I was used to: instead of being separated with the expanse of a stage between us, my audience now stood far too close to me, and I could hear the rhythm of their enthralled breaths behind my sensitive ears.
But my mother was poised as always, seemingly unclouded by the various pairs of intimidating eyes that locked onto her fingers with frightening vigilance. Her eyes were nearly closed with tranquility, a grin spread across her face in a manner I had never seen before, and her skillful fingers worked with such graceful aptitude I had grown momentarily distracted from my own part of the duet.
She was in her natural state. My mother was born a musician. There was no dissociating her from music and performing, and I knew then that she had never lost her passion at all. That she was merely deliberately avoiding her passion with an incessant strain that pulled at her heart.
Why was she avoiding her passion so adamantly? I wasn’t sure. I don’t think I’ll ever know.
After our performance, she shyly accepted the compliments given by our friends and family, bowing slightly in accordance to her Chinese etiquette. She dismissed herself shortly afterwards and disappeared upstairs, leaving me alone with my gift in my hand and our music dying in my ears.
From that night forward, I would often lie awake into the darkest hours of the night, my eyes burning into the corrugated pattern of my ceiling whilst the image of my mother playing the piano filtered through my mind like a mile-long roll of film. The indelible reflection of her refined face, relaxed and at ease with the thin whisper of contentedness painting over her cracked skin, drove an incessant reiteration into the back of my head, echoing until the ripples of its soundwaves and every inch of its colored pixels melted into my walls.
For the two years following my fifteenth birthday, my mother’s declining stability grew prominent within our household. Adherent to the gradual reduction of her music, my mother had soon begun to morph into an unrecognizable being of sadness: a figure shrouded with twisted agony and irreparable anguish that I could not seem to analyze, regardless of the countless times in which I attempted to reconcile with her.
She would nearly always turn away in dismissal, reassuring me that there was surely nothing to be concerned about. Other days, she would hint at a mere fraction of her story, yet when I reached out to interrogate her, she would shake her head.
There was something about my mother’s eyes. Something horrible and desolate, miserably vacant with the expanse of sorrow in her fractured irises. The woe melancholy crumpled in her eyes spoke of a confession; something that told me she had reached the nadir of her suffering. That she was porcelain: not the artistically sculpted figurines of lustrous clay, but the shattered pieces of a vase that plummeted to the ground without the intent of ever standing back up again.
What had caused my mother to become so miserable? As naive as I was all of those years ago, I cannot seem to recollect any instances in which my mother would be pushed to such a cruel state of despair. Even now, as I am much older, my mind goes blank, my mouth dry and my hands cold at the thought of my mother growing so wretchedly unfortunate.
I can still remember the day I realized the extent of her suffering. I was one week shy from turning seventeen, standing outside the front entrance of my high school with my violin case--the one she had given me--in my frostbitten hands. I pulled at my coat in an attempt to eradicate the shiver that tore through my body, and my fingers grew slippery as they struggled to keep a hold of my violin. Faintly, the sound of my ringtone permeated through the pockets of my puffy winter coat, and I grappled to retrieve my phone with vexed haste.
Yet when I answered, it was the sound of my father’s voice that spoke back at me. And when I began to recognize the incoherent spurs of noise as his attempt at speaking English, I knew something was terribly wrong.
“Your mother,” he choked and sputtered like his throat had been slit. “Your mother…”
My violin fell from my fingers and collapsed onto the ground, the black casing smothered in dusts of snow.
///
The doctors said it must have been suicide.
There hadn’t been a note or anything to explain why she did what she did. There hadn’t been anything at all present within the vicinity of her body, save for the remains of what was supposedly her method of suicide: a handful of pills the size of my fingertips, scattered around our marble floors. Her eyes of burnt coal left behind not a single spark of life or joy in them.
When I had seen her body, she was unidentifiable: she was not the youthful woman in the photograph my grandmother had shown me, but the decaying image of despondency. The pools of shadows beneath her eyes leapt at me unyieldingly, whispering blameful mantras into my ears to replace the music that had long died out. Her expressionless face stared up at me with vacuity behind her eyes, her unsmiling lips pale and bloodless with depleted exaltation. Her soundless voice was accusatory, bitterly subjecting me to a blame not belonging to myself, yet I accepted that blame regardless of reality.
look at me, she seemed to be saying.
look what you’ve done to me. what did all of that suffering amount to? there is no ending but tragedy.
Guilt ate away at my bones for weeks.
How could I ever repent for the loss of my mother? I stared at myself for hours and studied my face in the mirror: the face of a girl who has failed everyone in her life. The face of guilt and hot, rising shame. Of regret, mourn, and bereaved ache.
A week after my mother’s death, on my seventeenth birthday, my father sat at our dining table with sullen eyes red from unsettled tears, detachedly staring at my birthday cake. The white frosting was melting beneath the pod of orange light above our heads, the mismatched candles hunched over and exhausted from the flames I had blown out minutes before. He held the kitchen knife in his hands, his paper-thin skin stretching over his bones as his trembling grip brought the point down toward the cake.
Yet before he could cut into it, he began to weep.
He gently placed the knife aside, allowing the buttercream to spill onto a pile of napkins, and held his face in his hands. His shoulders carried a staggering waver of anguish: a pain so poignant it reached deep into his body, the stress of heartache exulting from his cry. The quiet noise of his weeping brought me to inch my chair closer to him, and I hooked an arm around his shoulder in an attempt to offer a murmur of solace.
“I just don’t understand,” he whispered. “I don’t understand why she did it. Was it something that I did?”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t,” I replied. “You were good to her. I could tell she loved you a lot.”
“But why else would she want to die?” he asked, blinking away pebbles of transparent tears that began to run down his face. “There must have been a reason.”
“There is always a reason, but sometimes we’ll never know why,” I glanced over at our living room, only a hallway away from the kitchen. “That’s all there is to it.”
“I wish I could have done something. Maybe it would have stopped her.”
“I wish I could’ve done something, too,” I admitted softly. “But it’s too late now.”
His palms imbibed his tears as he pressed his eyes against his hands, the shake in his shoulders intensifying with each passing second. His voice was broken. Its shattered fragments drive their sharp edges into my skin, cutting and jarring.
I embraced him warmly, hearkening to the sound of his quivering voice throbbing against my shoulder. The sound of his sobs never left my ears.
///
It has been two months since the day my mother passed.
Today, I am sitting at my desk, remembering how my violin looked when I gave it away to the local music academy. It frowned at me between bitter tears as our departure sprung open with the same painful tenderness of an unraveling rose. My hands felt empty, and an unfamiliar emotion crawled through my trachea until I began to choke.
The pain never lessens, I’ve learned. It never dwindles, and every time I remember what my mother did, the pain is always the same. It crumples down on me like a dilapidated edifice, every inch helplessly collapsing without restraint, fracturing each facet of my mind.
The pain never lessens, but I have learned to distract myself from its grimness.
My mother and I had always been two separate components of a symphony; on our own, we were able to create harmonious melodies, yet when we clashed with one another, the only sound erupting from our interaction would be sputters of discordant noise. There had always been a disconnect between my mother and I, no matter how many times she patiently stood behind me whilst I practiced, no matter how many times she brushed the hair out of my face and encouraged me to keep going.
She was beautiful on her own, orchestrating her own music with flawless complexion. Yet she struggled with maintaining a harmonious relationship between all those in her life, and her once euphonious song would break into cacophonous calamity.
There had always been a gaping hole standing between us, and yet that hole is now hopelessly irredeemable. It seems as though it will always stand beside me: a reminder of how I failed to close the aperture years before she took her own life.
Perhaps if I just asked her a few more questions, or if I had just spent one more day alone with her, she would still be here today. Perhaps if I properly told her just how much I loved her, she would still be alive.
She would have been forty-one.
I think of the painting I had seen once at an art museum. Spirit by George Roux. The image of a woman's spirit, seated behind the ivory keys of a piano, her gentle fingers gracefully gliding with a poised sense of unspoken melancholy. Her white silk gown, the tails dissipating into the ground until their ghastly breaths evaporated into the stillness of the night. Her gloved hands, thrust into a cavity of delicate fabric, drifted aimlessly to produce the sound of a song I could not hear.
I think of my mother, and wonder if her spirit is sitting behind our family piano. Sitting behind the chipped paint, carefully admiring the dully polished keys as she embraces them with the genteel of her soft fingers. My mother, a beautiful young woman, her heart bursting with mellifluous harmony that leaks from her body in the form of tears. She had always appeared to be so horribly upset when she played at night, as though her screams traveled through her fingertips, her voice pressing into the keys with an incessant anguish stashed away within the core of her heart.
The faint sound of our family piano bleeds from the living room downstairs. I lean against the window of my bedroom with exhaustion burning in my veins, hearkening to each echo that my mind grapples onto. I trace the sound with my mind, wondering if my mother is playing that song. Wondering if she is filling the stone-clad emptiness in our house, left behind by her death.
Perhaps all she ever died for was another duet between us. A complete symphony.
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