The day air hit my lungs, my mind knew that air was meant for the flute. The days my fingers fumbled with Cheerios, they seemed to know one day they’d awkwardly spill across a piano. When my child voice cried out, “Mommy,” they seemed to know my words would soon make up pitch-less melodies as I attempted to pull together my muddled thoughts into one note, one song. Yes, I knew very young that I was bound to be a musician.
I have yet to feel anything as comfortable as a flute in my hands and song in my soul. And yet, I failed to recognize what it really meant to be a musician.
It was just this past summer that I found myself in Nashville, or Music City. I’m not sure I can pinpoint it, but there is something impeccable about being in the epicenter of the music industry. I can’t tolerate country music in the least, but I soon learned that music lurks everywhere in downtown Nashville, and in all forms.
Corner guitarists strung lines from Nirvana to Ed Sheeran. People sung in the streets, handing out hats for money or simply just to hear their own voices. The city cramped with singers who couldn’t hold a tune, air guitarists who couldn’t strum, drummers without rhythm. Still, it was a melody to be admired. 
The music was chaotic and the lines were distorted; it was nothing like my classical training.
We came across the symphony center, and decided it fitting to tour it. The inside was absorbing, yes, but the finest it had to offer was out in the courtyard. There was a fountain proudly running and bike racks shaped into treble clefs; there were music notes hidden on the concrete begging to be found; there were flowers boastfully growing in the summer air. And then there was a memorial site.
I must admit that I have no clue who this memorial belonged to. I haven’t the faintest idea the man’s name, nor his significance, but I rather cared about the words written under his name:
“He will always be the music.”
Well dang, I thought, I want to be the music.
Those words, written on a gravesite of all things, inspired me more profoundly than the words from the living.
The words, I suppose, convinced me to muster the strength to gag down the clichés of what it means to play music and spit out the truth. As I bleed my thoughts from heart to song, or onto the words on paper, I realize that I can be the words in between the lines. I can be the white lie and the ugly truth, whatever I wish to be; as long as it’s me. As long as it is my soul. I am art.
The words reminded me that my music, my flute, is a gateway into my soul. Music is the thoughts nobody dares listen to unless they are cloaked in the vanity of melodies.
These words are timeless, and be impeccable. If you do what you love and it doesn’t absorb you, you aren’t doing it right.