The Song in Simon's Head

         I started composing when I was seven years old because I ran out of music. I had listened to every cassette tape and every record in the house, over and over and over again. I wanted more so I wrote it myself.

         I delighted in finding inspiration. I wrote the sound of my mother's voice, telling me my hurt would go away. I wrote the sound of my father's laughter. I wrote the arguments my sister and my brother and I had. I wrote thunderstorms and I wrote the stars. I wrote the trees, and the feel of the softest grass, the kind that's new and inches tall but never been mowed.

         I was sixteen and at my piano lesson when I had my greatest inspiration. My piano teacher was an old woman, tall, skinny, with white hair pulled into a tight bun. Her voice was high and shrill, and she had all the patience of a hummingbird. Her face was wrinkled and her mouth was always in a pinched, puckered position, like she'd been passed up for a kiss long ago, and she was still thinking about it bitterly.

         I smirked as I slowly stretched out my left hand to play a b-flat minor chord, then plucked out a few notes with my right hand... this note, but then replacing it with that note, hearing the tune in my head and trying to transpose it to the real world.

         "Simon, Simon!" my teacher's voice rang out, high as always, wavering too, like an old opera singer. My heart beat a little faster with excitement and irritation. The idea, the idea! I had it! It was brilliant and I wanted to go with it, right now. I wanted to play and create and construct- and I was being interrupted.

         "What?" I asked, not bothering to hide my annoyance.

         "Can we return to Mozart?" demanded my teacher.

         "But-"

         "Now, please. You've half an hour left. You can wait until then to play your own music."

         "I- I, um..." I looked blankly at the sheet music in front of me, no longer reading, merely seeing black lines and dots. In my head the music swirled. "Right." The music got louder, faster, a storm on the ocean in my head, the waves crashing, making the music in front of me even more dull, even more silent. "Right." I repeated.

         There was no hope. I jumped up from the piano, whirled toward the door, and without another word to my confused teacher, ran out. The tune wouldn't get away from me. The music! The sound! The story! Oh, music always has a story. Music tells more stories than words ever can.

         I drove myself home, not turning on the radio and barely paying attention to traffic, hanging onto the sound in my head like a life preserver, afraid if I let go I'd never find it again. At home, I pounded through the door and raced down the hallway to the grand piano my parents had bought for my sixteenth birthday.

         I nearly knocked the bench over in my rush to settle down to the piano. I wasn't composing something simple as grass or trees, or an emotion or color. I was writing music that told so much more. There were so many intricate melodies all braiding through each other. Putting it all together was a like solving a complicated jigsaw puzzle. No, I wasn't writing something simple such as the sky or a storm. I was writing a person.

         People are so much. They have so many sides. Many people show more than one personality based on the situation they're in. There are so many reasons, and then sometimes no reason at all, for what people say and do. To write a piece of music that represented, or actually was a person was a bigger task of composing than I had ever tried before.

         Crashing noises and soft lullabies fought each other for dominance in melodies. Sorrowful minor chords and grandiose major chords contrasted against each other. At some point my parents got home from work but I didn't notice when. My younger brother tried to tug at my shirt and tell me dinner was ready, but I waved him away. I thought about the person I was trying to write. I thought about the gentleness and the anger, the laughter and the tears. How could you put all of that into one song? One great song even, or symphony, with so many melodies?

         It was late when finally, the music, so loud in my head, started to recede. Like the tide of an ocean after a storm, it slowly and quietly went back, fading away. My mom told me to stop making so much noise, my younger siblings were trying to sleep. I had school in the morning. I had to sleep. I thought about my muse again. I hadn't completed my song. Frustrated, I banged a fist down on the keys for a satisfying, dissonant crashing sound.

         "Simon!" my mom scolded.

         So the song wasn't done. I looked at the pieces of paper scattered about, a few in front of me on the piano stand, many wrinkled from me crunching them in my palm and throwing them around me. Some notes were put together, a few melodies and harmonies had successfully weaved themselves into the beginnings, or maybe the middles, or the ends, of a song. The song in my head had gone quiet. But it wasn't completely gone.

         I realized it then. The song wasn't going away that easily, because it wasn't just in my head. It was alive, in the person I was trying to write. I thought about her again and smiled as I got up to go to bed. So it wasn't finished today. Well, there's always tomorrow.