The woman took good care of me. She went by the name of Ms. Emily; however, her full name was Emily Darling. She always wore her hair in a bun, never letting it down unless she needed to go to sleep.
She taught me a lot, from how to spell to the multiplication tables. She brought me up to speed about many of the things that I had missed out on in my absence from society.
“Whatever this adds up to, I hope that I can steer you in the right direction,” she said. Before me, she never had much of a life, or at least that is what I heard whenever I asked her. She was always a quiet one, not having too much on her mind. It was I that gave her a purpose.
I learned about gardening and planting, things that I honestly never really saw myself doing in the past. She always went on long afternoon walks if she ever wanted to catch a breeze.
Soon I actually had the courage to actually walking outside on my own. I really liked the lake that I walked by in the middle of the road.
I could see a little bit of a floating disk in the middle of the water. I looked around. Only a couple people seemed to be walking around in my midst. Most of them gave me glares as I contemplated what to do with the drum.
Jumping into the water, I looked at what appeared to be a drum. Exerting my strength upon it, I pulled the drum out of the water. Sea-weed covered the drumhead and tangled onto some of the wires. I saw that the snare was still very much intact.
I tapped my finger on top of the drumhead. The sound of the snares still rung true to the memories of when I had seen the rock band in the outside world. Rusting off some of the underwater gravel, I saw the emblem Pearl written on the top of the head.
***
“Mom!” I called. “I found this large drum underwater.” Ms. Emily hurried over to me when I got back.
“Why do you always seem to be able to find all this junk lying around?” she asked in a sarcastic tone of voice. Together with our arms we hulled the drum inside. “Found some treasure I see.” I tapped my finger on the snare head. Each time the snares rung, I found myself shivering with a lot of fright. “We’ll keep this down in the attic…”
“NO!” I shouted.
“I meant so it can dry. You can stay down there if you want.”
***
I kept tapping my finger against the drum, trying to remember the sounds from the psychologist hospital. I wonder what had happened since the last time I had been there. What was really going on there?
“You seem very connected with that thing,” Ms. Emily said. “I’ll be upstairs fixing us some lunch.”
“Ok,” I called back.
***
As I looked at the drum, memories of the past started swiveling inside of me. The time that I had spent watching the band became more and more fixated within my brain. A single tear drop fell from my eye, wetting the drumhead with a tiny sprinkle.
***
The playing of the band continued to resonate within my ears. The playing that filled me with so much joy in the past, and now here I was, struggling to comprehend even the sullen sense of doubt that utterly plagued me as I went on.
“Mother, do you ever feel like you’ve been cheated?” I asked. She was working on another one of her grandfather clocks.
“Well, what on earth do you mean by that?” she asked as she continued to tinker with the little nuts and bolts that made up the entire clock.
“I mean that do you really feel like you are actually being a good person by making everything tarnish away?” I asked. She turned to me and laughed.
“Why dear, sometimes it is best that we turn away from the past and start afresh,” she said. “It is what really makes us very complete in the greatest sense of the word.” I didn’t understand the word that she had said, but I decided that it would be best that I keep my mouth shut on the fact of the matter and keep moving forward in my life.
***
Time literally started to pass by as I continued to move on in my own life. I went to school. I tried to make friends, yet for some reason I couldn’t help but feel the memories of the past snag their ways into my skull. Ebbing away at my composure. I sat as still as I could in the middle of class—but the drop of the chalk would instigate a crash symbol.
“I’m sorry, I need to step out,” I said. The teacher said go right ahead, but it almost made me feel like a sense of guilt as I thought about the memories of the past. It brought me a sense of guilt as I reflected on the drum playing. The masterful playing that resonated with me.
Finally, towards the end of the school day, I knew that I had finally received my chance.
Music class. The teacher taught us about the movement of the percussion instruments.
It was the nostalgic feeling that I had never felt in awhile. The cymbals that played on the front of the drum. The sticks slammed on the drumhead like a train running on wheels that were about to run over a person. I thought for once that I could feel the power within each and every stroke that fell on top of the drum head. For some reason I could feel the power that burst through the power of the drums.
The band started to play inside my head. I could feel the power within the sounds of the drums. The power that I wanted to play.
***
Whn the entire piece was done, I was the only one still standing there as the band member started to wrap up his schtick.
“Can you teach me how to play like that too?” I asked. He looked into my over-eager eyes and gave a wink.
“I think I would be most delighted to give you lessons if I ever could,” he said. I smiled at the very prospect that he had agreed to the fact that he wanted to give me lessons. For some reason, that really filled me with a lot of joy that he had enough of a willingness to actually do something like that. We sat down together. Suddenly the memories of the band started to fill inside of me. The inclination to play gripped me like a hi-hat ready to pounce on top of my shoulders and start doing the jig.
“Slow down!” said the instructor. It wasn’t long since I had played that I realized I was playing through the smoke on the water song.
It was during that time that we played and played. It was during that time that I had my first shot at what I really wanted to do. It was something that truly resonated with me.
“You must be gentle with your strokes,” the man said as he observed everything I was doing. I gripped the stick with my index finger as tightly as one that attempts to use a drum stick as a means of a weaponized force.
“I’ll see what I can do for you in the meantime,” he said. Soon we learned all kinds of things like rolls and six-tuplits. I learned that there were the very essence for me to perform well in front of the rest of the stage.
“So who was it that got you interested in the art of drumming?” asked the instructor, sitting down on one of the stools. I told him all about the journey that I had gone through and the band that I had encountered throughout my journey. It was a pain just thinking about all the times that I had tried to become a part of the band.
“I had mostly been a sight-seer from the beginning,” I said. “However, I really wanted to play in a band one day.” The teacher simply nodded his head.
As I walked away from the rest of the teacher, I felt like he was fading away like the drifting cells that disappeared as the floaters that make up the rest of the eye. I couldn’t quite tell what was going on as I wandered through the rest of the night without a single sense of fear within my eyes. But times told me that I really wasn’t the right person to do this kind of stuff. Maybe it was truly fate that had led me over here to him. Maybe it was a sense of destiny that I found him.
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