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"Do you now understand? Between the two of you, who will end up utterly ruined and broken?"
Kang Bio had played the piano for as long as he could remember. Every morning had begun with the notes of piano burrowing into his head, fingers twiching with the need to play. He had gone from looking forward to resting his hands on the black and white keys to forgetting anything else existed, his excitement slowly giving in to numb routines. The endless competitions, once nerve-wracking, became empty places that reduced him to a mere number on someone's mind.
Kang Bio had played the piano for as long as he could remember. Yet, he couldn't begin to understand when the melody of his music discounted his feelings and worth as a person.
Music is a sacred art where a genius can come along and rewrite the history binding it. And a genius was talented, raw and overflowing. They could transform music into feelings and emotions that impermeated the very being of humanity. Kang Bio realized that while he was none of that genius, he did not even belong. His family did not just disapprove of him– they rejected his very existence.
He ceased to exist for his mother if he stumbled from the course she set. She rejected the very idea that her son could be anything less than the first.
He did not exist to his grandfather who thought that his very attempt at music and life was a disgrace. It did not matter if he spent his every waking hour practicing– his hardwork was nothing more than a clownery he refused to let go of.
It appeared to be a punishment of some sort. His birth, his growth, his efforts, his emotions and his needs– each one of them unwelcome. And so, he had striven again and again and again to prove that even someone as displeasing as him deserved a chance at life.
And all he recieved in return was— "You've got not talent."
He looked back at all the hours spent trapped between the black and white keys, rigid tunes escaping onto his gifted grandfather's notice, only hoping he would look back at the grandson he believed will never he enough, if not in approval, then atleast in a correction. But his grandfather might have looked at a stray cat that he hated with more emotion.
Kang Bio's music was, he grasped, not just ignored. It was denied the right to exist. Like the black and white keys– he was either talented, or undeserving. He could never be grey. Grey was dull, boring, soulless. Grey was him.
Choi Jeongyo had coloured him briefly and his dull grey world had begun to reflect some of the breathtaking tones the boy had. He had built sandcastles in the air, high on the happiness the piano brought him after more than a decade of persistence. He thought that with Jeongyo, he could learn to enjoy and love piano. That he could learn to weave his emotions into the melodies he played. The nobelesse concert which had been the best performance he ever gave had instilled hope. He could atleast try.
Ah, but they say it was not him. Nothing had changed in him except for sharing the stage with Choi Jeongyo. Kang Bio had been dragged along through Jeongyo's emotional expressions. Afterall, what would a person as presumptuous and vain as himself know about emotions? They made sure he knew that he had none.
He was feeling faint, and his heart refused to stop clenching. How weak. How pathetic. He should have had no emotions. He should have never wated more. And he shouldn't have reminded himself what it felt like to be free and happy. Then it would not have hurt.
In some distant corner of his consciousness, he could hear someone calling. He prayed it would stop– both this undeserving life and unwanted music.
He was tired and he wanted to sleep.
And he dreamt of strong fingers tapping on his back in an obscure rhythm he'll never begin to understand wondering how they would feel on his bare skin