He had music
His left hand fingers were calloused and he lost the majority of tactile sensibility in them. He played his guitar four to five hours daily, no matter how tired he was, no matter how sleepy. It was like a religion to him, music. He believed in the healing and miracle powers of notes sending their waves through the air. He had to… since he had nothing else left.
His body was slowly decaying, his disease was slowly eating him from the inside out but he had music and he couldn’t give an honest damn.
Sometimes, it was even hard for him to pick up his guitar. He felt pain daily - on a scale from 1 to 10, it was at a 5. He felt like his ribcage was crushing his lungs, like his bones were breaking, healing, then breaking again. Yet, there were times when it got worse. There were times when he couldn’t even get up from bed because the pain was too much to handle, when his heart would pound so heavy in his chest that he felt like it would rip open his rib-cage and skin and just jump out of its cavity. There were times when he couldn’t speak because he was grunting and screaming in pain, when his skin would sting so bad he couldn’t stand anything touching him. Still, no matter the pain, no matter the feeling of being run over by a tank once every few seconds, he still picked up his guitar and played.
The faint movement of the hollow body of his acoustic soothed him. The different frequencies of the strings he plucked produced vibrations not only in his ear but it was like his whole vein and artery system vibrated with it, making his blood flow more smoothly. And the sequence of notes told his life story. A pathetic arrangement of low notes following each other, chasing each other to finally trap higher chords between them in a sick tango.
That was his life, wasn’t it? A sick tango, danced by one.
He couldn’t ask anyone to love him. He couldn’t be so selfish.
He was dying at an insane speed, he could barely get out of the house most days and his treatment suppressed his immune system so much that the hospital became his second home. Pills, steroids, chemotherapy were part of his every-day life. So no… he couldn’t ask anyone to love him.
Because if someone did, they would suffer more than he did. They would feel his pain increased ten times, they would work to make him feel better and then be left alone with a tired heart when he would surely die. He’ll escape this, soon, but them? He’d kill their spirit, he’ll see them shedding blood tears, he’d see their heart slowly beating to a stop - to a point where they’d have no strength to get up again and smile.
His disease turned him into exactly that - his disease. Except that what he did, unwillingly, was worse. He ate people from the inside and turned them into a living shell. He could see life genuinely, painfully slow, leaving their eyes. He could see them slowly losing their own will to live and the guilt that it was his fault was too much for him to handle.
He couldn’t take life away from a person. That’s why he isolated himself in his music. Because with music, he gave life. His songs were his children and his guitar was his lover. The wood caressing his skin, indenting in his chest as he bent over his instrument to scribble notes on whatever surface he could write upon was contact enough for him.
He was happy. He was genuinely happy. Music filled any emptiness he might have felt.
Yea… he had music.