A Most Wrenching Piece of Music

While I was climbing my way up the higher-learning stairs, I stumbled upon the fact that I might not be able to graduate. Thus, like any other students, I panicked. Ran around like a lunatic with no friend to turn to except for my computer. There I began to nurture my writing skills. I found release in them, by re-interpreting the incidences in my student life to within my stories, and making them disappear by solving even the most difficult dilemmas. But in real life, it was not so.

I continued to scrounge around for relief, or maybe something that might help ease my impending doom. I discovered Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. 

I decided to play it when my roomies were gone and I was all alone in my room. For one, they would not understand. Luckily that suitable day came, and I was free to play it as loud as I could. 

When it began, I could not hear it at all. It seemed to materialise out of the air, and began to arch upward, reaching toward something, only to pushed back by another invisible force. It was less struggling and more like trying to stand up inside a quicksand that slowly sucks one in. But then all throughout the piece, one continually tries to stand up, pushing gently upward, with that invisible force still pushing in the opposite direction. 

When the strings finally rally around that invisible force, the resulting sound was almost shocking, weeping and angry at the same time, like someone saying "Here! Take it! Isn't this what you've wanted all this time!?" Said with tears, anger and force, the words simply fell flat on emptiness. We are left on a musical limbo, before the struggle began again, but with less force, as if the music finally relented to that invisible force. It even died away to a whisper.

But what a whisper. 

P/S: It was fortunate that I was alone listening to this - I cried buckets. And no - I made it through, I graduated.