Where the Stars Wait

The backstage corridor outside the concert hall smelled like dust warmed by stage lights. My sheet music sat open on the edge of a prop table, corners weighted with rosin tins, and the pencil marks in my own handwriting looked too sharp for how tired my hands felt. I had been running the same page in my head for hours—counting bars, fixing breaths, smoothing the parts that always snagged on the last phrase—yet my eyes kept drifting to the thin blank space where the melody refused to finish.

I’d carried that unfinished line since childhood. Not the whole thing, not the comfort of a complete score, just the missing note like a tooth you can’t stop touching with your tongue. Adults had called it imagination. Teachers had called it a habit. I’d called it nothing, because calling it anything made it louder in my chest.

Now, with the hall’s doors shut and the crowd still trapped behind velvet curtains, the building should have stayed silent. Instead, a faint melody leaked through the walls—so soft it could have been someone tuning a piano behind a closed door. Three notes rose, then paused, then the next line tried to form, as if the air itself remembered how to play but didn’t know the ending.