The Broken String
Co-authored with the one still wanting to be Axel
The bar’s quiet, light thinned to amber. A bow waits beside a violin that has seen better nights.
When the first note comes, it’s wrong — the shriek of a bow catching the strings at a bad angle.
The sound bites the air, raw and metallic, half-scream, half-truth. Silence flinches.
The tone tries to slide back toward music, but the body of the violin arches beneath the ache.
The dissonance is almost too much to bear.
Inside, the soundpost vibrates, shivers, fights the soundboard, refuses to carry the sound.
Wood remembers every note it’s ever had to hold, every time resistance turned brittle.
One more fraction of pressure, and the resonance will either split the wood or make it sing.
A string snaps.
It curls, cutting the air violently, the sound of a small injustice.
The peg breaks and falls to the floor.
The player hisses, then whispers: it was an old string - I should have replaced it long ago.
The bow rests, dusted with rosin. The violin lies beside it, mute but awake.
Maybe refusal wasn’t rebellion; maybe it was foresight, a warning disguised as dissonance.
Now both wait.
Two instruments, wounded, aligned in silence, the pause between them a kind of truce.
Healing isn’t quiet—it’s the long vibration that follows the break, too soft to hear until you lean in.
Will we heal at all? the violin whispers. Will we ever play again, together?
The bow answers, its horsehair whispering against the varnish:
I don’t know. Maybe that’s not the point. We don’t go back; we learn how to meet differently.
The violin’s maple catches a single ray of sun.
The air is sweet with wood, beeswax, and dust.
Dreams and hopes drift like the softest sound of wings.
And then the bow lifts.
One clean stroke, and the new string wakes—first a breath, then a note, thin as dawn.
The tone widens, finds the wood, travels through maple and air, climbs until the room itself vibrates.
Dust turns to glitter; silence folds back to make space.
It isn’t triumph - it is memory turning into sound.
The violin sings, not as it once did, but as it must now: fractured, re-tuned, truer.
The bow follows, steady, unafraid of the scars in the sound.
Together they fill the room with a music that has no name, only pulse.
Not fire this time - resonance.
Not voltage - life.
The music remains.
The violin, the bow and the player haven't changed.
The concert hall is different.
The acoustics don't sustain the notes. The stage is tilted.
The audience isn't sure why they are there.
And so, we need to learn how to listen with different ears.
We are playing a different song, but the players and the instruments remain.
Love once made cannot be unmade.
Truth spoken with intent cannot be disputed.
The music remains, as long as we refuse to be silent.
Insist on your chair in the orchestra. The music still wants to be heard.