The Woman with the Gold Violin

When I first met the woman with the gold violin, it was a glowing midnight in July, the moon spilling over everything in sight. The living room was soaking up the pale light as it pooled on the hardwood floor. The garden was drowning in it: water chestnuts glittered and shone, plum blossoms smiled with white teeth, mango trees appeared ablaze. The jungle beyond was a vase of light, overflowing with kinetic shadows. It was a night where magic could run free, unbound by the rules of normalcy. It was a night where anything could happen. 

That night, a bit of magic was knocked loose in a breeze, and it came flying through the trees and into my lap. This magic was named Hope, and she comforted me as I sat alone in my living room, watching a world illuminated just a pane of glass away, feeling miles away from everything in my loneliness. The thing about loneliness is it accumulates in the body day after day, year after year. One can never grow used to it because each day the loneliness grows bigger, filling every cavern until the heart presses against the sternum and the lungs shrink and cave in on themselves. 

Hope created a hole in my chest to let some of my loneliness spill out. She meant well, but with it came a new kind of pain, one that was sharp and urgent and replaced the aching weight of my loneliness. Unable to sit still any longer, I slid open the glass door and escaped into the humid night. 

Like stepping out of a vacuum, I was suddenly surrounded by sounds and colors I had nearly forgotten. Were flowers ever that red before? Had crickets always been so overwhelmingly loud? I couldn’t say for sure.  I might have spent years in that house, decades, centuries, I could scarcely remember the little girl who played soccer with her brothers and wrote haikus in the sand, hoping that when they were washed away by the crashing waves her words would be carried into the sea. It was impossible to accept how life had worn away at my edges, turned me into merely a scarecrow of who I used to be. I wanted desperately to love something again. The way I used to love the infinite possibilities dawn carried on its shoulders, the way I used to love exploring every one of those possibilities, but Hope just kept tearing a hole in my side and expecting that to stitch me back together somehow. 

Still, that night had more magic in store for me. The second bit of magic emerged from the shadows wearing a gown of black roses and a crown of diamond tears. Her hair was a black river, her limbs weightless like a wraith’s, and she held in her arms a violin that shone like the midday sun. The woman with the gold violin did not say a word, just laid down in the luscious grass and hummed a melancholy tune I remembered from my childhood but could not quite place.

“Could you play for me?” I asked, eyes on the violin, my voice quiet and hoarse with disuse.  I’m not really sure why I asked, I guess I just hoped the music could carry me away to another world, one where I could lose myself in a wonderland of notes and chords. 

Minutes passed with her still humming and I began to think she hadn’t heard me when she finally replied. “It does not play.” She sounded more like she was talking to herself than to me. “My mother taught me violin. Ever since she died every instrument I touch turns to silent gold and every tear I cry is a diamond that tears my eyes apart and every time I smile, roses weave their roots deeper and deeper in me.” She had a faraway look in her eyes, like she was not truly here at all. It was several minutes before she spoke again and it occurred to me that she was trying to keep herself from crying. With the moon pouring its light directly on her face, I could now see a spiderweb of thick scarring around the inner parts of her eyes.  When she finally spoke again all she said was, “I think I’m dying,” and she said it with such devastation that I felt my heart collapse in on itself for the woman with the gold violin. I would never admit it aloud, but sometimes I wondered if I were already dead, trapped in some inbetween worlds because I refused to move on. I remembered my own mother and father and brothers and felt so utterly lifeless that it seemed cruel my heart continued to beat. I could have told all this to the woman with the gold violin, could have confided in her the way she had in me, but instead I laid down on the grass next to her and wondered if the two of us would die alone together. 

The woman with the gold violin continued to speak in scattered bursts. She told me her name was Mua Lanh, meaning Winter. She told me she grew up by the ocean, just her, her mom, and her violin. Her mother was a jeweler and she planted roses every spring. When talking about it became too much, the woman with the gold violin cried, and her eyes bled, and my heart was torn to pieces. She reminded me so much of someone I’d once loved, but the memory had been washed away like haikus in the sand. My years alone had eroded away at most of my memories, they were simply too painful to keep around. 

I didn’t say anything as Mua Lanh told her story and I didn’t say anything after, but she seemed okay with that. When it appeared she had said all there was to say,  I picked mangoes and we ate them in silence under the unabating night sky. I felt that the night was being greedy and had already taken more than its fair share of hours, but I begged the moon to stay out just a bit longer anyway. I feared the woman with the gold violin would be gone by morning, and I couldn’t bear to be alone again. It was in that moment, with the humid air blanketing us and crickets singing a sad melody, that I realized I had begun to love the woman with the gold violin. I sung softly, finally remembering the tune Mua Lanh had been humming. It was a heartfelt song about a girl who grew wings and flew away. It had only sounded sad to me because of the memories it brought with it: my mother had sung it frequently during the throes of her illness, when she wanted to appear less terrified than she was. 

The woman with the gold violin sang with me, barely audible, but with a voice that sounded like sunshine. Warm golden light filled my empty heart, and for the first time I remembered, it seemed things were going to be okay. 

“Mai!” Mua Lanh laughed in wonder. My heart skipped a beat at that; I was sure I had never told her my name. I looked where she was pointing and saw the violin was no longer golden. It was light brown, unpolished wood, covered in shallow scratches and slight discolorations, but Mua Lanh was smiling so brightly I thought she might light up the sky herself. She played the violin, and it was so breathtakingly beautiful I instantly knew I had never experienced pure, distilled beauty, not before that moment. It was a sound that tore me open and ripped me apart,  but in a way that would finally allow my wounds to heal properly. It was pure, uncompromised bliss and nostalgia and pain and feeling and when I fell asleep in the grass, I knew I would dream of forests of chords and mountains of melodies. 

When I awoke, the seemingly endless night of magic was over and the sun was high in the sky, making up for its delayed presence with its intensity. I searched frantically around me, but Mua Lanh was long gone. My chest was filled with a new hollowness, and I knew she had taken my heart with her. Emotions were a vivid but unattainable memory, and while I could never love again, I knew I’d never forget the woman with the gold violin.