You ever just sit there and look at your hands and they feel like they don't belong to you? Like you’re piloting a drone or something? It’s 2 AM and the crickets out here in the holler are louder than my own thoughts, which is saying something because my brain is basically a browser with fifty tabs open and half of them are frozen. I’m sitting in the kitchen, the linoleum is peeling at the corners—my landlord, Mr. Henderson, says he’ll fix it but he’s eighty and mostly just comes over to talk about his prize tomatoes—and I’m just... staring. My left hand is sitting on the table like a dead bird. You know that feeling when something is breaking but you’re just watching it happen? Like a glass falling in slow motion? I moved back here five years ago because the city was too much, the rent was eating my soul, and honestly, if you’re a cellist, you think you can play anywhere, right? You think the music is inside you so the geography shouldn't matter. But out here, people look at the cello case like I’m carrying a coffin. "Play us a tune, Ben," they say at the general store, like I'm a jukebox. It’s funny, I spent twenty years learning the most recondite fingerings for the Dvořák B minor, and now I’m just the guy who lives in the old Miller place and plays "the big fiddle." Is that weird? To feel like you’ve been translated into a language that doesn't have the words for who you actually are? So, the thing is, there’s this ache. It’s not even a sharp pain, it’s just this... *ennui* in my knuckles. That sounds pretentious, doesn't it? But it’s like my joints are tired of being asked to do things. I was trying to run through the Allegro passages today—you know the ones, they’re supposed to be like water hitting stones, just fast and light—and my ring finger just... quit. It didn't cramp. It just stopped. It’s like the signal from my brain got lost in the mail. Have you ever had your body just file for divorce from your intentions? It’s bizarre. I should be panicking, I think. This is my whole life. This is the only thing I’m actually good at. I mean, besides maybe making decent coffee, but you can't exactly pay the electric bill with that out here. I remember my teacher in conservatory, this ancient Russian woman who smelled like mothballs and Mentholatum, she used to say that the cello is an extension of the lungs. If you can’t breathe through the wood, you’re just a carpenter. And I’ve been a carpenter for a long time now. But lately, the wood feels heavy. It feels like lead. I was trying to practice the Elgar concerto—the first movement, that big, dramatic opening—and I couldn't even get the grip right. My fingers felt like overcooked sausages. Just fat and useless. And the weirdest part is I didn't even get mad. I just put the bow down and went to make a sandwich. Is that normal? To just watch your career evaporate and think about whether you have enough mayo left? My mom calls me every Sunday from Florida and asks when I’m going to audition for the symphony in the city again. She doesn't get it. She thinks success is just a matter of wanting it hard enough, like it’s a Disney movie. I told her today about the stiffness, and she was like, "Oh, take some aspirin, honey, you're just getting older." Older. I’m 38. That’s not old, is it? But in musician years, maybe I’m a fossil. I see these kids on YouTube, sixteen years old, playing Paganini caprices like they’re breathing, and I just feel... nothing. Not even jealousy. Just this flat, grey horizon. It’s like when the power goes out in a storm and you just sit in the dark waiting for something to happen, but you know the lines are down for miles. Sometimes you wonder if you chose the life or if the life chose you, and then you realize it doesn't matter because you’re both stuck in the same room anyway. I spent my twenties in practice rooms that smelled like sweat and rosin, missing parties, missing funerals, all for the sake of a perfect vibrato. And for what? So I can sit in a drafty house in the middle of nowhere and feel my joints turn into gravel? I tried to explain it to the guy who fix my truck, Silas. He’s a good guy, but he just looked at my hands—my "soft hands," he calls them—and said I should try soaking them in Epsom salts. "You got it easy, Ben," he said. "You just sit and play." He doesn't know about the tension, the way your spine twists, the way you have to hold your breath to hit a high note. PEOPLE JUST DON'T GET IT. There’s this one passage in the second movement, very quiet, very delicate. It requires this pinpoint precision, a ghost of a touch. I tried to play it an hour ago. My index finger hitched.