Ichika Matsumoto Pov • No Sign-up

I looked at my hands. I looked at the rough, scarred skin. I thought about how his soft, lotioned fingers might feel against mine. Like sandpaper on silk. Wrong.

Every morning, I wake up at 5:47 AM. Not 5:45, not 5:50. The precision keeps the anxiety at bay. I brush my teeth, tie my hair back with a black elastic that leaves a dent in my ponytail, and walk to the conservatory while the city of Tokyo is still soft and gray. I do not listen to music on my headphones. I listen to the rhythm of the train tracks. Clack-clack, pause. Clack-clack, pause. I count the rests. ichika matsumoto pov

It sounds like freedom.

I stand in the green room. The other musicians are stretching, humming, pacing. I stand perfectly still. I am a statue. I lift my violin—a 1920 Enrico Rocca, a gift from a grandmother who believed in me before she died—and I tuck it under my jaw. The wood is cold. It smells of old varnish and rosin dust. It smells like my childhood. I looked at my hands

The Gravity of Silence

Tonight is the audition for the National Youth Orchestra. The soloist chair. The one my mother missed when she was seventeen. I am not playing for glory. I am playing to close a loop in my mother’s timeline. She lives in the past, in the measure she failed. I am her repeat sign, her second attempt at the cadenza. Like sandpaper on silk