[ WP ] You suddenly realize your true purpose in life ... and it 's a duty you do n't want .

The music danced through the still air of the empty practice room, notes flowing effortlessly from her fingers as the bow swept gracefully back and forth, always in perfect time. 
 
 It'd been a dead and sterile sort of silent when she'd arrived. The case'd opened with a crisp pop when she'd undone the latch. The rosin'd rasped across the bow like sandpaper. That sound had started to make her cringe. 
 
 A minute into playing she became conscious of the shoulder rest digging into her collar bone. She tried to ignore it, she'd tried a few different rests and they all had the same problem, this one a bit less than the others. She began to worry she was getting used to it. Her arms had hurt when she'd started playing a few months ago but that'd stopped bothering her within a couple weeks. She knew she was running out of excuses not to practice every day, or to cut it short an hour. 
 
 She reminded herself that any hope for a decent kind of future lay in the generous scholarship offers that'd started rolling in with alarming regularity at home. Her parents made sure to read every one. They never made her read them, but they always left them on the kitchen table, they were always reading them when she walked in, they were always talking about it when she was trying not to listen. 
 
 The music began to build, 8th notes became 16th, became 32nd, became loud enough to drown out the frenzied tapping of her fingertips on the fingerboard. She reached a deceptive cadence and a slight decrescendo before building again to long high note she held with a sweet vibrato that gradually slowed the piece down to a more relaxed tempo. 
 
 For a moment she got carried away. She remembered how great it'd been at first. The music had been beautiful, she'd not been brought up with anything like it, she'd wanted to pick up the violin, she wanted to make sounds like that. It'd been a pleasant surprise when after a couple weeks she'd sounded twice as good as the students she'd been listening to. She felt proud when the teacher said he'd never seen someone learn so naturally. It was amazing at first, to learn, to play for an hour every day, amazing when the school let her take an instrument home. Sometimes she still felt like that, she loved the music, she loved pieces that got fast and tricky, that took practice to work out like this one had so she could feel proud for getting it right. She loved being creative, lending her own interpretation to the piece. The transition from the vivace to the moderato had her own signature on it, which she could n't quite help but smile about for a second. 
 
 She played on. 
 
 With every long note the strings dug deeper into her fingertips. The shoulder rest was now really firmly stabbing at her collar, the chin rest had started to press too hard into her jaw. Despite all the practice her wrist was getting sore. But there were only a couple pages left. 
 
 She looked forward to resting for a minute, she looked forward to going home and felt a pang of dread when she realized she would n't be heading there for nearly another two hours. She thought about how her mother would ask again her how practice was, how it was going at school, how another letter from another conservatory had come. She thought about how proudly she would smile at her when she met her outside the school. 
 
 She thought about how full of crap food the fridge would be when she got home. She thought about how much was gon na get thrown away, how much they all wasted. She thought about how much debt they were in, she thought about how casually they whipped out a credit card, she thought about how they'd not put money away for her college and how she'd never go if she did n't come here and play until it hurt every afternoon, and how she needed to go so she could keep playing and make money, make sure her parents could retire. 
 
 She thought about how she'd never got out with anyone, or did anything since she'd started this. She started thinking about how fun it all used to be before there'd been any pressure. She thought about how much she could barely even enjoy listening to music anymore, how much it made her sick, how much she hated it every day, how much she wanted to smash her violin over the stand and go home and lie in bed and be left alone. She thought about how there was still a page to go. 
 
 She stopped playing 
 
 `` Why'd you stop'' 
 
 She took a deep breath. She forced herself to look collected. 
 
 `` Just a cramp'' she made a show of flexing her wrist `` I can keep going.''
