I used to want to be a singer. I would sing to myself all day, just to hear the notes and the tunes that I could make up and it never meant anything but it meant everything, too. I sang until the day my father told me to be quiet, because my voice was distracting him from his work. I didn't sing again after that.
I used to play the violin, because one time my mother was playing a song on the record player, and she smiled and for the very first time that smile reached her eyes. I liked that smile, and I wanted to see it again and again and again and if that meant I had to learn to play the violin it was worth it; but no matter how I played she never heard me, and I never did see that smile again.
I used to believe in love, when I was seventeen and she would let me hold her and kiss her and eat apples with her under the stars. But then my parents told me she wasn't good enough for me and stopped letting me out to see her just because she came from a family that didn't have much money and she had dark hair and eyes like circles of black silk, and I never did get to say goodbye. There were so many after her that I cannot begin to remember, but I see her face bright and clear as the sun when I think about it and sometimes I'd rather forget because it burns like the sun, too.
I used to care about other people but then I saw the real world and the war and the people coming back from it, and I realized that people were stupid, evil, fragile creatures who didn't really deserve to live and I had to pretend to care about some people because of their skin and hair and eye color but if I could have sent everyone to the gas chambers I would have and the Aryan race be damned.
I used to stand on the railroad tracks, feeling the metal trembling under my feet and hearing the horn and thinking about how maybe this time I wouldn't step out of the way in time. But I always did and the wind from the train would knock me down and I'd laugh until I realized I was crying.
I used to think that living forever would be a good thing but then I met her and she told me just how meaningless my life was and it hurt because it was true. She asked me who hurt me and I didn't understand because no one had ever laid a hand on me or even raised their voice in anger and she kept talking and I realized that maybe you don't have to have scars on your body to have been broken apart and put back together with pieces missing.
I used to
The pen slipped from his nerveless fingers to land with a clatter on the floor. Lorelei told him that writing down his thoughts would help, and then thrust a blank book and a pen into his hands. He told her it was stupid, and by extension so was she, but he'd kept the book and pen.
It was a month before he used them, and when he did, he thought she must have lied. He had been writing for an hour, and he was in agony. There was a place behind his heart that ached so horribly he thought he might be dying, his throat had a hard, painful lump lodged in it and his eyes burned and ran ceaselessly. He had never thought that writing could cause such symptoms. It took him far too long to realize what he was feeling.
"Sorrow." He spoke the word softly, acknowledging it, and that opened the floodgates and ripped down all the walls he had so carefully constructed.
Nicklaus put his head down on his desk and wept.