p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;" align="center"span style="font-style: oblique;"span style="font-weight: bold;"LIFE IS A SONGbr /THE STORY OF "HUMMING BROOK"/span/span/p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"In the shade of a lush hazelnut tree, the child with thick afro hair played his violin, one note after another, tirelessly. He stayed there most of the time, every day, until the evening shadows forced him to go home. He played and sang, always with a smile on his face, wearing those strange round sunglasses that gave him a look too mature for his ten /Music was everything to him, nothing else seemed to exist in his world. Some might have called him a child prodigy, given his precocious talent, but for many he was just a nuisance: strumming the violin and singing all day, a real torture for the /His name was Brook, but people now called him "Humming Brook".br /"Humming Brook" was born and until then raised in that small village located on an equally small island in the middle of the Western Sea. For his seventh birthday his father, aware of his unbridled passion, had given him an old violin purchased at half price and since then he had never parted with it. Everything around him was a source of inspiration for him, which generated new melodies in his head and rhyming words that accompanied them. For Brook, life was a long song that had to be sung to the end, with /The villagers passed by, looked at him, some stopped to listen to him and complimented him, many others reproached him for just wasting his time and told him that he should go to school, study or find a job. There was no room in their hearts for music because they had become too dry to host a sprout in need of water and care. The singing child hoped in his heart to be able to change all this, to give everyone the joy that only the right song at the right time could make people feel, but as the years went by he would realize, with deep regret, that only those who had the ears in the heart could understand the magic of music: the rest of the people would only ever have a single pair of ears on the sides of their heads and would hear nothing other than what they were interested in /Little Brook also had a big dream, which he hoped one day to be able to realize: wandering around the world, seeing what was beyond that infinite expanse of water that surrounded the island and making his music known to everyone, so that they could make it a balm for the soul. Although he adored the hazelnut under which he played every day, he had no intention of emulating it by putting down roots in that place. Just like a melody, he too wanted to be carried by the wind and arrive who knows where and who knows when. Perhaps due to his extremely young age he was free from the chains, prejudices and beliefs that adults /Brook wasn't afraid to sing his truth to the /Brook wasn't afraid of the power a song could have on his mood, changing it in a /Brook wasn't afraid to live life./p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"After finishing the melody he was playing, he observed the environment around him, focusing on details such as a white-winged butterfly fluttering in the bright green grass, the leaves moving in the breeze and the warm sun that illuminated that summer day. He took a deep breath and smiled, showing perfect white teeth, then put the violin back on his shoulder and sang a song he had composed the previous evening./p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"span style="font-style: oblique;"span style="font-weight: bold;"You say life is a dream where we can't say what we meanbr /Maybe just some roadside scene that we're driving pastbr /There's no telling where we'll be in a day or in a weekbr /And there's no promises of peace or of happinessbr /Well is this why you cling to every little thingbr /And pulverize and derange all your sensesbr /Maybe life is a song but you're scared to song alongbr /Until the very ending/span/span/p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;" /p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"**************/p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;" /p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"He walked at a slow and elegant pace in his classic cut dress made even more particular by the blue jabot and properly polished black moccasins, retracing one last time that road on which he had traveled for twenty-nine years. In his right hand he clutched the leather case that contained his faithful and inseparable /Many years had now passed, the seasons had followed one another cyclically for several moons and "Humming Brook" had become a man, ready to leave the island aboard a battle convoy (of which he would be the captain) to carry out his dream. In all that time he had never stopped playing and singing for a single day, because to do so would have meant losing /Behind the ever-present dark glasses, no one could see those tears that wet his eyes at the thought of saying goodbye to that place that he, until that moment, had called home. Before reaching the port and setting sail towards unknown destinations he had to stop again under that hazel tree which was now old and less lush than it used to be, but which remained special for /When he found himself in front of it he contemplated it, smiling and crying in silence, and then went to take shelter from the sun under his branches. He delicately placed the case on the ground and took out the violin, ready to close the concert that he had started twenty-two years earlier. In musical jargon they called it "coda", the final movement which contained within itself all the feeling evoked up to that moment. He wondered if there could be the perfect song to represent all this and only the one he had composed some time ago came to mind. He had adjusted the lyrics and titled it "Life is a song".br /Trying to contain his sobs, he placed the hair of the bow on the strings and began to move it back and forth, reproducing that ancient melody and accompanying it with words./p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"span style="font-style: oblique;"span style="font-weight: bold;"You say life is a dream where we can't say what we meanbr /Maybe just some roadside scene that we're driving pastbr /There's no telling where we'll be in a day or in a weekbr /And there's no promises of peace or of happinessbr /Well is this why you cling to every little thingbr /And pulverize and derange all your sensesbr /Maybe life is a song but you're scared to song alongbr /Until the very endingbr /Oh, it's time to let go of everything we used to knowbr /Ideas that strengthen who we've beenbr /It's time to cut ties that won't ever free our mindsbr /From the chains and shackles that they're in/span/span/p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"He sang it all, up to the last verse, and then burst into tears, thanking that tree for having been his silent spectator countless times. Maybe one day he would perform on the world's biggest stages, in front of audiences so vast they couldn't see the end, but that little corner of the world would forever remain his favorite /When the sobs stopped shaking his thin and long body, he put the violin back in the case, said goodbye to the hazelnut and left without looking back, because if he had done so he would no longer have been able to find the strength to leave./p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"From that day another sixty-one years passed in which "Humming Brook" lived a thousand adventures, met many people, was part of two crews, died and came back to life thanks to the power of a devil fruit that he had ingested. In that very long period of time, the hazelnut tree so dear to him stopped producing fruit, but its hair still remained remarkable considering its advanced age. Many were convinced that sooner or later it would have died, while others (the more sentimental ones) liked to think that it would survive until Brook would return to play for it. They said it was all that music that made it so strong and resistant to the passage of /When Brook's first wanted posters appeared, the legend of that child prodigy, his violin and the tree under which he played began to be passed down from generation to generation in the village. The little ones believed that it was just a story invented by the adults to make that place seem less anonymous and monotonous, but those who had actually known that child knew well that it wasn't just a simple /That was the true story of "Humming Brook"./p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;" /p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'lucida grande', 'lucida sans unicode', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 0px auto 1.286em; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"span style="font-weight: bold;"AUTHOR'S CORNER/spanbr /I don't know if you will like this story, which is a bit particular and different from the usual, but in any case I can say that I put a lot of heart into writing it. Brook is a character that years ago I didn't even consider in the slightest or whose comic or tragic side I only saw; recently, however, I found myself wanting to analyze the side of him as a musician, the one that leads him to constantly sing and play. And I discovered that maybe, deep down, he and I have more in common than I /This story isn't just about Brook, but it also has a lot about me in it, about my love for music, about the fact that since I was a child, as soon as I heard a song I liked, wherever I was I started /Some curiosities about the story:br /- The song that Brook sings (and which is also the title of the fanfiction) is "Life is a song" by Patrick /- The number nine is recurring in the story because it is the number that identifies Brook, being the ninth member of the /- I chose the hazelnut as a tree because it is linked to the number nine: nine are in fact the years it takes for a hazelnut to start producing its fruit luxuriantly./p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'lucida grande', 'lucida sans unicode', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"Thanks to everyone who will read!/p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"In the shade of a lush hazelnut tree, the child with thick afro hair played his violin, one note after another, tirelessly. He stayed there most of the time, every day, until the evening shadows forced him to go home. He played and sang, always with a smile on his face, wearing those strange round sunglasses that gave him a look too mature for his ten /Music was everything to him, nothing else seemed to exist in his world. Some might have called him a child prodigy, given his precocious talent, but for many he was just a nuisance: strumming the violin and singing all day, a real torture for the /His name was Brook, but people now called him "Humming Brook".br /"Humming Brook" was born and until then raised in that small village located on an equally small island in the middle of the Western Sea. For his seventh birthday his father, aware of his unbridled passion, had given him an old violin purchased at half price and since then he had never parted with it. Everything around him was a source of inspiration for him, which generated new melodies in his head and rhyming words that accompanied them. For Brook, life was a long song that had to be sung to the end, with /The villagers passed by, looked at him, some stopped to listen to him and complimented him, many others reproached him for just wasting his time and told him that he should go to school, study or find a job. There was no room in their hearts for music because they had become too dry to host a sprout in need of water and care. The singing child hoped in his heart to be able to change all this, to give everyone the joy that only the right song at the right time could make people feel, but as the years went by he would realize, with deep regret, that only those who had the ears in the heart could understand the magic of music: the rest of the people would only ever have a single pair of ears on the sides of their heads and would hear nothing other than what they were interested in /Little Brook also had a big dream, which he hoped one day to be able to realize: wandering around the world, seeing what was beyond that infinite expanse of water that surrounded the island and making his music known to everyone, so that they could make it a balm for the soul. Although he adored the hazelnut under which he played every day, he had no intention of emulating it by putting down roots in that place. Just like a melody, he too wanted to be carried by the wind and arrive who knows where and who knows when. Perhaps due to his extremely young age he was free from the chains, prejudices and beliefs that adults /Brook wasn't afraid to sing his truth to the /Brook wasn't afraid of the power a song could have on his mood, changing it in a /Brook wasn't afraid to live life./p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"After finishing the melody he was playing, he observed the environment around him, focusing on details such as a white-winged butterfly fluttering in the bright green grass, the leaves moving in the breeze and the warm sun that illuminated that summer day. He took a deep breath and smiled, showing perfect white teeth, then put the violin back on his shoulder and sang a song he had composed the previous evening./p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"span style="font-style: oblique;"span style="font-weight: bold;"You say life is a dream where we can't say what we meanbr /Maybe just some roadside scene that we're driving pastbr /There's no telling where we'll be in a day or in a weekbr /And there's no promises of peace or of happinessbr /Well is this why you cling to every little thingbr /And pulverize and derange all your sensesbr /Maybe life is a song but you're scared to song alongbr /Until the very ending/span/span/p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;" /p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"**************/p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;" /p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"He walked at a slow and elegant pace in his classic cut dress made even more particular by the blue jabot and properly polished black moccasins, retracing one last time that road on which he had traveled for twenty-nine years. In his right hand he clutched the leather case that contained his faithful and inseparable /Many years had now passed, the seasons had followed one another cyclically for several moons and "Humming Brook" had become a man, ready to leave the island aboard a battle convoy (of which he would be the captain) to carry out his dream. In all that time he had never stopped playing and singing for a single day, because to do so would have meant losing /Behind the ever-present dark glasses, no one could see those tears that wet his eyes at the thought of saying goodbye to that place that he, until that moment, had called home. Before reaching the port and setting sail towards unknown destinations he had to stop again under that hazel tree which was now old and less lush than it used to be, but which remained special for /When he found himself in front of it he contemplated it, smiling and crying in silence, and then went to take shelter from the sun under his branches. He delicately placed the case on the ground and took out the violin, ready to close the concert that he had started twenty-two years earlier. In musical jargon they called it "coda", the final movement which contained within itself all the feeling evoked up to that moment. He wondered if there could be the perfect song to represent all this and only the one he had composed some time ago came to mind. He had adjusted the lyrics and titled it "Life is a song".br /Trying to contain his sobs, he placed the hair of the bow on the strings and began to move it back and forth, reproducing that ancient melody and accompanying it with words./p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"span style="font-style: oblique;"span style="font-weight: bold;"You say life is a dream where we can't say what we meanbr /Maybe just some roadside scene that we're driving pastbr /There's no telling where we'll be in a day or in a weekbr /And there's no promises of peace or of happinessbr /Well is this why you cling to every little thingbr /And pulverize and derange all your sensesbr /Maybe life is a song but you're scared to song alongbr /Until the very endingbr /Oh, it's time to let go of everything we used to knowbr /Ideas that strengthen who we've beenbr /It's time to cut ties that won't ever free our mindsbr /From the chains and shackles that they're in/span/span/p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"He sang it all, up to the last verse, and then burst into tears, thanking that tree for having been his silent spectator countless times. Maybe one day he would perform on the world's biggest stages, in front of audiences so vast they couldn't see the end, but that little corner of the world would forever remain his favorite /When the sobs stopped shaking his thin and long body, he put the violin back in the case, said goodbye to the hazelnut and left without looking back, because if he had done so he would no longer have been able to find the strength to leave./p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"From that day another sixty-one years passed in which "Humming Brook" lived a thousand adventures, met many people, was part of two crews, died and came back to life thanks to the power of a devil fruit that he had ingested. In that very long period of time, the hazelnut tree so dear to him stopped producing fruit, but its hair still remained remarkable considering its advanced age. Many were convinced that sooner or later it would have died, while others (the more sentimental ones) liked to think that it would survive until Brook would return to play for it. They said it was all that music that made it so strong and resistant to the passage of /When Brook's first wanted posters appeared, the legend of that child prodigy, his violin and the tree under which he played began to be passed down from generation to generation in the village. The little ones believed that it was just a story invented by the adults to make that place seem less anonymous and monotonous, but those who had actually known that child knew well that it wasn't just a simple /That was the true story of "Humming Brook"./p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'Lucida Grande', 'Lucida Sans Unicode', 'GNU Unifont', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;" /p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'lucida grande', 'lucida sans unicode', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 0px auto 1.286em; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"span style="font-weight: bold;"AUTHOR'S CORNER/spanbr /I don't know if you will like this story, which is a bit particular and different from the usual, but in any case I can say that I put a lot of heart into writing it. Brook is a character that years ago I didn't even consider in the slightest or whose comic or tragic side I only saw; recently, however, I found myself wanting to analyze the side of him as a musician, the one that leads him to constantly sing and play. And I discovered that maybe, deep down, he and I have more in common than I /This story isn't just about Brook, but it also has a lot about me in it, about my love for music, about the fact that since I was a child, as soon as I heard a song I liked, wherever I was I started /Some curiosities about the story:br /- The song that Brook sings (and which is also the title of the fanfiction) is "Life is a song" by Patrick /- The number nine is recurring in the story because it is the number that identifies Brook, being the ninth member of the /- I chose the hazelnut as a tree because it is linked to the number nine: nine are in fact the years it takes for a hazelnut to start producing its fruit luxuriantly./p
p style="border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15.12px; font-family: 'lucida grande', 'lucida sans unicode', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; list-style: none; margin: 1.286em auto 0px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.5; color: #2a2a2a;"Thanks to everyone who will read!/p