There was a musician who woke every morning with a committee of ghosts shouting in his skull,
You missed the chord, you fool
you dragged the tempo
you’re aging, you’re slipping, you’re fraying like the hem of a cheap coat.

He carried the voices around like a house with cockroaches.
He played to outrun them. He practiced to bury them. He slept poorly because they took shifts, working overtime in self-doubt. His piano sat in the living room like a black-lacquered confession booth. He’d lift the lid, inhale the dust of former triumphs and disasters, and try to force beauty out of himself.

One night, late, humid, delirious, after a gig where he believed he had ruined music itself by playing a single wrong chord, he slammed the door, flicked on the lamp, approached the piano with the dread of a musician approaching a border guard. He tried to fix himself by thinking, thinking, thinking, oh tragic faith in self-improvement, but every thought was another lash across the back of his imagination. Then something happened. A memory rose like steam from a manhole. One tiny moment, an accidental prayer. He had been alive in that moment, brilliant without permission, and he hadn’t even noticed.

He put his hands back on the keys. He exhaled the day’s self-accusations.
He whispered, “Fuck it.” This was the closest thing he had to a mantra. He played something wrong on purpose, a crooked melody limping across a cracked sidewalk. This wrongness, opened up the room. He felt joy, the outlaw kind, the kind jazz monks get when they stop worrying about whether God is listening and start playing because they are God for eight bars.

He banged the piano until his doubts packed up their briefcases
and left the building muttering about improper working conditions. When he finally stopped, sweat dripping like punctuation marks, he tore a page from a notebook and scrawled, “Self-hatred is not a metronome. Bless my mistakes. Let them teach me the way prophets teach by wandering.”

He taped the note to the piano. He sat there listening to the silence grow warm around him. In the days that followed, he played better, the way Ginsberg read “Howl” in 1956, with wild permission to be messy, human, divine, and absolutely alive. People told him he sounded new. He laughed.
He knew he was simply sounding less afraid.