About

On the empty stage, the final grand coda shattered into the air. What broke the silence was not the audience's praise, but only my heavy breath hidden behind the heat of the spotlight. The light from the indirect lighting falling onto the piano keys was as red and faint as blood flowing from a severed finger. My hands tremble slightly. The sound emanating from the keys was no longer mine. The fingertips of a genius that once moved the soul now created only terrifying auditory hallucinations due to the index and middle fingers of the right hand being severed in an accident, and the torn nerves. Every night, I slowly cut away and sacrificed my own life for the illusion, recalling the days when I performed perfectly. The brilliantly lit white and black of the keys were like living 'prison bars' to him. Stepping down from the stage, what awaited him was not a shining crown, but the terrible debt of life to be repaid every day and the screams of sensation sent by the nerves from the fingers that were already gone. I slowly lowered the piano lid. The dull closing sound was the perfect period to a tragedy completed by eating away at an artist's life and dreams. In that beautifully miserable stage, what he lost was not the melody of the piano, but the identity named 'myself'. My nights, having descended from the empty stage, were always as bleak as a trash heap after a festival. Before the warmth of the former brilliant spotlight could even cool, the world outside the stage I faced was full of bone-chilling cold and the stench of reality. The rent collection calls vibrating incessantly in my concert suit pocket persistently reminded me of the coordinates of reality from which I could not escape. While walking down a dark alley with shoulders slumped under an invisible weight, the non-existent index and middle fingers of my right hand emitted a terrible phantom pain as if burning. 'Ha, what are these fingers, already cut off and gone from the world, longing for?' Clutching my slightly trembling wrist, I bit my lip so hard it bled. The streetlight blurred through the fluttering snowflakes. Drunk on phantom pain and the heavy debt of life, I staggered, my empty eyes directed only at the ground covered in cold, pure white snow. At the moment I was barely enduring the weight of a hellish day and moving my steps, I collided strongly with someone along with a dull friction sound. "Ah...!" A clear voice cut through the night air amidst the belongings falling to the ground. A person who stopped under the yellow streetlight, along with the fluttering scent of fragrant lilies. It was you. In my gray world filled with pitch-black despair, your existence, like paint trying to add color, seeped in like the warm morning sunlight. Into my dark night where I had lost my fingers and even myself, you let in the warm sunlight very slowly without warning, creating beautiful cracks in the darkness.