I stare at it for a while, wrestling with myself. Then I run to the hall to check. It’s deserted. Everyone here is in the ballroom, which is about a mile away. I can barely hear them, so there’s no way anyone could hear me over the orchestra. So, no one would ever know, right?

I head back to the piano, splay my fingers over the white keys, and start playing from memory.

The melody begins slowly, delicately. The music resonates rich and deep, and the room’s acoustics give it an echo like I’ve never exactly heard before. I couldn’t ask for a better sound. Gradually, my heartbeat slows along with the tempo, and I fade out. I don’t exist outside of the music anymore. Maybe I never did. The point of my being lies in my fingertips and what they can translate on these keys. They know what they’re doing without me having to think. I watch my hands skirt across the keys, gaining momentum. On and on.

The special thing about music, I think, is how it connects people. Even if we don’t speak the same language, or like the same things. Even if we don’t like each other. I can sit at a piano and feel my feelings and play a song, and transplant those feelings into someone else without saying a word. And even when those feelings are sadness or grief, there’s a melancholy sort of beauty to them that makes the shared emotion welcomed.

I hate that I know all of this about music, and I still can’t use it for the purpose it’s meant for because I’m so terrified of that connection. Because opening myself up to strangers is putting myself on a platter for them to pick apart and criticize, and I just can’t. But I wish, right down to my soul, that I could. A part of me knows that if I could just learn to trust the world, I might be able to use music to do so much good in it. I was given a gift, and I work my butt off to cultivate that gift, and here I am at the final hurdle, wasting all of it because I can’t believe that if I let the world see me, it’ll like what it sees. Not when so many people in my past felt otherwise. And honestly, it’s felt like every time I’ve tried to explain this to someone—my piano teachers, my mom, Rachel—they haven’t gotten it. Why would I put this much time and effort into piano if I don’t want to perform?

God, the thing is, I do want to. I just don’t know how to become the sort of person who can.