The Fiddler
A darkness: The mood of the city seemed to match his own. Flickering street lamps a symptom of neglect and decay. Trash in the gutters. A million souls in the city and each one lonely and never fully seen or understood.
He turned the corner, hands in pockets. Deep in thought. Dark. Brooding. Hopeless. Far off sirens screamed. Homeless encampments for the mentally ill and modern-day ascetics muddying the illusions of progress.
Neon lights painted the sidewalks ahead. Cesspools, he thought. Desperate flesh grinding against flesh. He tucked his face into his secondhand jacket, protecting him from the cutting wind and a humanity he loathed. The risk of intimacy and the pain of being let down again.
A note, screeching and haunting, traveled on the wind. A melody emerged on its wings as melancholy as his world weary heart. Something softened inside.
A thawing: The open entrance. A respectful crowd huddled. A lone man on stage. Lights and a fiddle.
Derek stepped inside on a whim, the music disarming. He found a spot against the back wall, far enough from the crowd. But with a clear view of the musician.
Fiddle crying, the musician stepped to the microphone and began to sing. The emotion behind the lyrics was something real. Something Derek longed for but that eluded him. The words gave voice to something he felt but could never hope to articulate.
The vulnerability on the stage, that was something he once had but the world stripped away. Something life taught him was too pure to share with others. Something he hid away and buried.
A recognition: Derek closed his eyes. It was the realness of the thing. The man on stage. Devoid of defenses as if naked. Unafraid. Nothing held back. Nothing false.
Derek stepped toward the crowd, considering for the first time that the people there might be just like him. Seekers. Youth searching for something transcendent in a city of silicon and steel. He began to feel like he might belong. If not to the city and its people, then at least to this small gathering of souls.
The peculiar thing is that this feeling, this sense of softening, could have arisen a thousand ways and just as many times. A smile from a stranger. A barside conversation.
But it hadn't. It was that sad melody that broke the calloused mind. It was the defenseless fiddler that reminded him of how he'd once walked through the world, of the time before he'd learned to cope with the cruel hand dealt by fate. It was a lone fiddler that brought him back to life.