Eroica in Flannel
Today, I share a short story. Hope you enjoy it.
The room reeks of turpentine, candle wax, and desperation. Wood floors blister beneath the boots of genius and madness. I light another stub of a candle with my shaky hands - my fingers covered in calluses and ink - and I sit at the cracked piano like it's an old friend who’s about to punch me in the gut. Again.
I hate this. I need this. I hate that I need this.
My head is screaming. Not metaphorically - no, I mean that literally. There's a howling in my ears like werewolves gnawing at the edges of the moon. They say I’m going deaf, and I want to punch the walls because how the hell does a man write music when silence is stalking him, and catching up?
But I do write. I can’t not.
This house in Vienna is a coffin with windows. I haven’t bathed in days. The ink runs down my fingers like blood, and the candles are down to stubs. I’ve pawned most of the furniture for wine and blank parchment. I play the keys with fists now because fingers are too polite. The music comes out jagged, raw. Like it wants to break something.
Last week I vomited blood after dinner. This week I wrote a symphony.
Same difference.
There’s a rat living under my clavichord and it’s got better manners than most of the nobility. This isn’t for them. It’s not about cleverness or fancy fingering or virtuosity. It’s about screaming, man. Screaming through the keys. Through the strings. Through the void.
Because there's this... ache.
It sits in the chest like a stone that wants to be a bird. And maybe it’s love, or maybe it’s madness. Maybe it’s the sound of God kicking over a table in heaven. But I know this ache. I live in it. And I know - somewhere, someday - some skinny kid in a flannel shirt is going to plug a battered guitar into an amp that buzzes like my ears and he’ll know it too.
He’ll scream into a mic like he’s screaming into the sky, and they’ll call it grunge or punk or noise, but it’s all the same thing.
It’s me. It’s him. It’s us.
The ache doesn’t care about wigs or heroin or powdered faces or smashed guitars. The ache wants out, and music is the only way we let it escape without tearing ourselves apart.
So I sit. I write. My hands shake, my ears bleed.
The candle dies.
But I keep going.
Because even in the silence, I can hear it.
And I know you can too.