Guitarless....

There was a kid named Marcus. He grew up listening to the radio but he never felt any connection to the music that was being played. Until one time he heard a guitar driven blues song. He fell in love with the sounds the guitar made. It made him want to learn guitar playing himself. But he didn't have a guitar and couldn't afford to buy one. His school had several guitars but they were off limits to him and was reserved for use only during music classes where his teacher would demonstrate some of the things learned by rote during his college music major days. Marcus, just on a whim, decided to sneak out one of the guitars and take it home with him. He went to the store room where the guitars were kept and snuck one out the window and hid it in the bushes where he later picked it up. Back home messing with the guitar he found he had a natural talent for playing guitar. He found he could express himself in a way he was never able to before. The night seemed to pass quickly and when the morning came he snuck the guitar back into the school. This became a regular habit, he memorized the schedule when the guitar would be used and made sure that it would be in its proper place when the time came. None of the teachers even knew that he was using the guitar without permission. Marcus read everything he could about the technicalities of how to play the guitar properly. He found he had a passion not only for the guitar but for music in general. It made him feel alive. He learned the difference in emotion between a minor and major key. He learned to use the limited number of notes in the pentatonic scale and combine them into an arrangement which spoke of his feelings about the world. And he found new friends through music. He found that he was not alone in his love for music and became friends with people with varied ages, backgrounds and social classes, all united by a common bond, the genuine love for music. When he became more confident he would demonstrate his newfound skills for his friends knowing that they would appreciate the effort he put into it. Yet when performing for his friends he always held something back. He felt that playing his heart out in front of other people would leave him emotionally open and vulnerable. Back at school no one knew how good he had become in playing the guitar. During the day he suffered through classes where his music teacher was explaining basic things such as time signatures. At night he explored the depths of music that could never be taught at school but could only be discovered by having a honest curiosity about it. Time passed. He saved up enough money to buy a secondhand guitar of his own. He was graduating from school and had less time to play the guitar anymore. Even when he found the time to play he couldn't feel the exhilaration he felt before and felt that somehow, by playing the guitar mechanically he was betraying the purity of music. He made the conscious decision to stop playing altogether. Yet he knew that no matter what happened the music would always be in his soul.