Albert Walker Fuller Prize Winner
By Alex Tsukakoshi / First-year, Communications Major
I’m not sure if I have always been drawn to music, but I suppose our relationship officially began in my earliest years.
Tucked somewhat comfortably beneath two white-painted planks of wood that we pretended resembled an evergreen, it was a present whose significance I was yet to recognize. It was Christmas 2012, and I had come face to face with my very first guitar: black, unbranded, and void of passion. Throughout eight years of dedication, music was never more than a demonstration of finesse and technique; and despite relishing in the pleasure of applause, I remained relatively indifferent. Though I now prefer playing for trees and mirrors, it took me until my tenth year of schooling to learn there’s much more to it than simply strumming notes from a stave.
My older brother had lost himself in either chasing euphoria or running from its antithesis, but his pain reverberated through our once strong familial walls—and we crumbled all the same. He would disappear for weeks at a time, and although Melbourne has hardly ever dipped below freezing point, his pockets were always full of ice whenever he’d stumble home. Whether I had projected the expectations I felt had been placed upon me, or not, is irrelevant; there was no choice but to pick up the glass he had shattered and hide my bloody hands behind rictus-thick grins. A dark tension, thick as smoke, ran through each corridor both consuming and suffocating. And just before it’d fill my lungs, finally, I’d clutch that old guitar and slip silently out the back door.
I would find myself in the park off Alicudi, shrouded in stillness and utter silence. And there, I would free the anger and pain running from my jaded hands, letting my fingers dance across steel strings. A deep feeling of hiraeth1 drove my voice to soar in harmony, and it was there I learned how pain could be made into something beautiful. I wrote more, I let my voice carry me, I expressed everything I had bottled up, and came home lighter each time. And for the first time, I was playing for myself, and found the peace and soft comfort I had thought were irrecoverable.
Music allowed me to breathe, and the breaths brought connection with others like me, others who simply enjoyed my sound. Connection is what brings us to living from the depths of solely surviving. I have become my music as it has built and become me. I believe I truly saw its beauty for the first time and all that it could give and be in my stepsister’s tearful smile as I sung her down the aisle.
I’ve learned that creativity fosters connection with self and others, and connection is, and has forever been, the only light that guides us past hardship. I’ve learned that music runs in, around, and through me. It glistens in both night and day, and its glory sounds in crowded rooms and empty corners. I will nurture it as it has nurtured me, and I will forever attempt to share through it…all it has given me.
1 Hiraeth: a homesickness tinged with grief and sadness over the lost or departed.
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