Music

I wait under the stage for my students’ performance anxiously. This is their first and so do I as their teacher. I’m panicking inside but I’m all smiling outside, kind of hide the anxiousness so that my students won’t get too nervous for their first performance. They will sing the song from Les Miserable which is my favourite song, I Dreamed A Dream. Then, I give one of my students a wink when she shows a nervous face just before they start to sing the first verse. She does resemble me a lot when I was young.

            My name is Musica. I hope that my name will tell you all about my life. But after all, it’s not like my name can talk or something…so, I think I should proceed with telling you about my name. Like I said, my name is Musica which means music but it’s hard to believe that I hate music and I hate my name. I have lived my whole life without music and I’m okay with it. When my name can tells you a lot of happiness and sorrow, my life isn’t because it’s just full of sorrow. Until I realize something miracle, beyond my imagination.

            Everything starts with the day I was born and named as Musica. My parents are musicians and they think the presence of me in their lives will make them happy like music, so they chose Musica as my name. But after all, to hear music you must have the ability to listen so that you can feel every single melody with your heart and feelings. And my parents thought that I will grow up with music and become a musician myself. But one day, they realized something was wrong with me that made them sent me to my grandparents’. They realized something that they cannot take it as parents and musicians. They are so ashamed looking at me, because their one and only child will live her life almost without hearing ability.

            So, I end up growing up hating music, my name, and my parents. I went to a special school which sometime they will teach us how to listen to music but I always refused to learn them. I don’t know the actual reason but I just don’t want to. Maybe it will remind me of my parents when I think my name is too burdensome. When my friends said that music can cure the sorrow, I always argue that it didn’t. It gives me a lot of things that I don’t want to remember. Sometime I just become grateful that I cannot hear anything but sometime I hate the fact that I cannot enjoy music, because I think music is the universal language apart from smile. I don’t know.

            One day, I end up feeling something when I walk through the hallway. I can feel vibrations all over the place. It filled almost all of the emptiness in the hallway here and there. I follow it and I follow my heart. I can feel the vibrations somehow become greater when I approach the music room. I can hear a bit of the lyrics, it’s the I Dreamed a Dream song that touch my heart and make me go inside the music room. Then, for the whole week I have to learn how to differentiate all types of vibrations so that I can join my friends in a choir. To be honest, the day I can tell what music really is, I cried in my grandmother’s warm embrace. She did a lot to encourage and support me in learning music.

            Until this moment I am very thankful to her because of that and so that I am very grateful to my music teacher because she was so supportive when I said I want to major in music in university. Now that I become a music teacher myself, I guess that music really means a lot to me because I’m even married to a professor who is also have a residual hearing. Now, to help me and the others who has the same problem as us, he did research on the different in calculation of vibration of the tuning fork. And I even get to meet my parents again in their recent performance in an orchestra. Believe me that they are so proud of me.

            The spectators who stand behind me and give standing ovation to my deaf students bring me back to reality. Then, with a proud big heart I also stand to give a big proud applause to all my students because they are really hard working and never give up even though their parents once told me that their children should just forget about music. But I stand with a brave heart to make sure these kids can appreciate music too and now they do…