“And you need music for that because?”

He was fishing. She knew, and he knew, that the question was loaded with so much more.

Emily considered him for a moment as she took a scrap of paper and her fountain pen from her pocket, considered whether or not he was someone to trust. He was still a stranger, no matter how many times they had pretended to be wizards, or spies, or dinosaur hunters when they were children.

Emily went over to sit on one of the plastic benches screwed to the deck, lay the paper flat on her lap, then dipped her head so he couldn’t see her mouth as she spoke.

“She typed with her eyes shut.”

Emily could still see her, sat at her desk, eyes like narrow slits, fingers bashing away at that monster of a machine. Words spewing onto the paper like liquid letters that were simply waiting to be released from her mind. As always, Emily would be next to her, sketchbook on her lap and pen at the ready, filled with black ink.

“Go on.”

Emily wiggled her jaw, felt the stretch along her scar, sensed the words that were waiting for her to speak, waiting for her to stop caring how long it took.

“She always said it stopped the doubts.”

“And the same thing happens when you listen to music?”

“In a way.” The pictures always had a way of creating themselves and, by drawing in ink, it meant she couldn’t change her mind, couldn’t undo any so-called mistakes that were really meant to be.

That came before. To block out all the noises of a world she no longer wanted to be a part of.

It began when her speech therapist back at the clinic in Switzerland had played the piano. When Emily was having a particularly lengthy meltdown, tipping herself out of her wheelchair and lying on the floor, smacking her fists into the carpet and screaming at everyone. She remembered wishing she had the words to make them see that all she wanted was for them to leave her alone, to stop staring, to stop trying to fix her.

Her grandmother had tried to console her, but all she had done was lash out, shouted even louder. The therapist had ignored Emily, walked over to the piano and sat down to play. At first, the notes hadn’t penetrated, hadn’t found their way through the fog that still hung inside her mind, the ear that refused to heal because the nerves were too busy torturing her with pain. But then, as the therapist continued to play, the space all around her seemed to vibrate, to slowly trickle over to where Emily lay.

And just like that, the screams inside her head were stilled. All the images she did not want to see, and the frustrations she could not overcome, were forced away by those beautiful melodies.

From that moment on, whenever Emily became restless, or overcome with feeling, she would go into the room that looked over the lake and sit with headphones on, volume turned up. She would sit, calmly drawing all the monsters and demons that would not leave her be. She simply put them down onto paper, then threw them all away.