Nocturne #49 – The Golden Key

One day, I found myself in a perfect environment. It was my personal paradise, my dream hall, where I could do what brought me the greatest pleasure. It was a large multimedia studio, divided into sections by departments. With instruments and equipment, recording booths and mixers, orchestras and synthesizers, infinite virtual tools, photo and video cameras, a million colors of lighting, and an open veranda overlooking the most beautiful landscape merging a megalopolis and nature.

I sat in an armchair, looking at the huge monitors towering before me, thinking that this moment was a blank slate for me, from which the creation of the future would begin. That future I used to jot down as plans in a small pocket notebook, step-by-step, which was simply paused and stored in passive memory. Euphoria wouldn’t let me calm down. I couldn’t wait to touch everything.

The only thing this place demanded of me was to create something. This was my chance to reveal my vision, my skills, to make a sensation with my creativity, to change the world.

After a short pause, as the first wave of euphoria slowly subsided, I realized there was an unbearable silence around. But it wasn’t that creative, cozy silence that allows you to think. No. It was a deafening, sterile, lifeless emptiness, like in a meticulously cleaned but abandoned operating room. All instruments were ready, the air awaited impregnation with sounds, synthesizers were on, their firefly-like blinking indicators making the environment more futuristic, but it seemed they didn’t know what to expect from me. I just sat scared, feeling I didn’t deserve this environment. I touch the cold, perfectly clean key of the grand piano, and only a single, meaningless, mechanical sound emerges from it – a sound without history. This place, this perfect arsenal, had everything except one, the most important thing – inspiration.

And then, completely unexpectedly, something happened. It wasn’t a sound, nor an impulse from the environment. It was a feeling – as if, in the deepest, most inaccessible corner of the mind, something flashed. It was it – the “Golden Key.” And as soon as this key began to turn in the lock of my consciousness, the sterile silence exploded and filled with colors, melodies, stories. Lifeless instruments came alive, as if they had been waiting for me until now and were now offering ideas themselves. Huge, empty monitors turned into infinite portals, sailing directly into the sea of fantasies. That single, cold sound that came from the key moments ago was now the first chord of a grand symphony. Emptiness vanished. Chaos began, but it was that creative, divine chaos I had been searching for all my life.

Something incredible was being created! Around me, instruments weren’t just playing – they were singing. It was an orchestral tsunami of emotions, a cascade of notes painting surreal landscapes on the canvas of silence. No drug, no earthly pleasure could come close to the nirvana I was in. I was the composer, the conductor of this cosmic chaos. But my ears couldn’t believe what they were hearing. It was as if I wasn’t creating this, but rather something bigger, a power superior to me, expressing its message through my hands. This isn’t music; this is a cosmic odyssey. I traveled through galaxies at the speed of light, embraced black holes without fear, and conversed with inhabitants of completely alien worlds in their own language of music, befriending them.

And just then, as my symphony reached its climax, as the stars began to dance to my notes… Suddenly, the lights go out! Generators started roaring, but they didn’t have enough power for me to save everything. A panic attack began; I found myself paralyzed, unable to do anything to save it. My hall, this epic kitchen, slowly ceased to function. Everything shut down…

Monitors go black. Music abruptly stops. The singing of the instruments first turns into a deaf echo, then is replaced by heavy, all-encompassing, black darkness. This is no longer the sterile silence from the beginning. This is emptiness. This is “nothing.”

It felt as if I was cast out of paradise and returned to that cold, boring reality where colors don’t exist. And you know what was most painful? Not that I lost this brilliant project. But that I experienced it at all. I wish I had never seen what I could create. I wish I had never known what it means to be a god in your own universe because after that, being a mere mortal is an unbearable burden.

My mind clouds over. I became so unhinged, so crazy, that in this empty, dark room, I start searching for the golden key. I fumble my hands on the floor, on the walls, touch the cold surfaces of the equipment, as if it should exist somewhere physically. But I can’t find it anywhere. It got lost in the darkness. Or, perhaps, it never existed and was just a product of my tired mind’s fantasy.

And when hope finally fades, when I realize the key is gone, something else begins. I too begin to disappear. The contours of my body dissolve into the darkness, my thoughts slowly melt and merge with this infinite emptiness.

There is no more composer. No more music. No more universe. Only silence. And I too… am no more.