Lie

Sometimes my hands itch for the piano I neglected when I was a teenager. It stood in my bedroom, atop a chest of drawers, mostly collecting dust and looking at me with resentment, or so I felt. I didn’t look straight at my piano often. I had attributed a soul to it because I loved music and musical instruments spoke to me even when I wasn’t good at mastering them. It takes time to master the arts. I was mostly playing phoney show tunes, things my parents wanted to turn into party tricks when they were hosting. I often say that I was not a rebellious child. The more I look back, the more I wonder if my rebellion was in the silence I maintained and in the destruction of the opportunities that were handed to me. I never did manage to play the piano well. There’s a ghost of a tune permanently under my fingertips and I often reach out for a phantom piano.

My mother put me in art classes when I was little more than a toddler. It wasn’t completely harmless an exercise because we had art classes in school that were graded. It meant that my mother looked at my peers’ scores and then decided whether I was competing in the top league. I didn’t have to be the best, she was accepting of that, but I needed to be thoroughly on top of my mediocrity as far as she was concerned. I was 11 when she clearly told me that the art classes would come in handy for my biology examinations later on. That was the year I stopped trying art. I never really improved after that. Drawing, painting, fine arts — these together formed the second sacrifice I made to the altar of teenage rebellion. I continued scribbling in the back of my maths exercise books and in the margins of my diaries. My painting skills deteriorated fast, my sketching skills improved slow. I did continue to have a deep love for art itself, and when I moved to Europe with its grand museums, I took to visiting them frequently. Now I know my way around every corridor in the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square. I tried painting a canvas recently. It’s a wreck beyond salvation. I cannot look at the canvas now. I feel something inside me irreparably broke the night I ruined it. I threw it out this Sunday.

I was quite young when I took to writing as a form of self-expression. Poetry was the initial outlet that I resorted to, my mother still keeps a diary in which my seven-year-old self composed rhyming verses. I haven’t read them in years. I haven’t written much in years either. At some point during my teenage years, I recognised that if I were to pick up writing properly, it would have to be in addition to a professional career devoid of any creativity. In fact, I was encouraged to do that. Don’t give up writing, you can be a writer alongside your real job, my mother insisted. I wasn’t much impressed with this line of thought. A real job didn’t interest me but I knew I didn’t have a choice, a real job would be foisted upon me. So I consciously chose to quit writing entirely. There’s no creativity in my day job. It may well be the most boring job in existence. It pays the least in the department I work in. I feel nothing but apathy for it. There’s never a good response to “what do you want to achieve in your career” when all you feel is emptiness and apathy. I don’t care what I achieve, I have no ambition attached to it.