Chapter 42 - An Elegy in the Classical City

Vienna welcomed Michi's arrival not with the warmth of an embrace, but with a bone-chilling gust of autumn wind and yellowing maple leaves scattered across the cobblestone sidewalks of the historic city. Her footsteps traced the quiet streets beneath a canopy of gray sky, wrapped in a thick wool coat that hung a little too loose on her increasingly thin frame. Even the grand facades she'd once dreamed of seeing in person now seemed to pass by in a gray, indistinct blur, none of them quite managing to hold her attention the way they should have. Every breath she exhaled sent a thin plume of white vapor into the cold air, mirroring exactly how foreign and hollow it felt to stand at the very center of the world's classical music culture.

Inside a medium-sized soundproof practice room at the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien—the most prestigious music conservatory in Austria—the sound of a grand piano's keys rang out mournful and flowing. Michi's slender fingers danced across the piano's ivory with flawless, perfect technique, interpreting a Chopin sonata with the same high-level precision her professors had always praised her for. Her pitch accuracy was absolute, her dynamics measured with mathematical exactness, and every musical phrase executed exactly according to the highest academic standard. But behind that grand, majestic melody, a thick emptiness had settled deep in the pianist's chest. The sound of the piano was beautiful, but dead—no soul left in it, no bleeding pulse.

Michi had already been in Vienna for well over a month by then. Her busy days were filled with a packed lecture schedule, exhausting master classes alongside European maestros, and academic demands so extraordinarily high they forced her to pour every last ounce of her concentration into them. But in the gaps of quiet at night, once the lights of her cramped apartment room, smelling faintly of old wood, went dark and she lay herself down on her fold-out bed, the image of Rimba's face staring at her with a look full of devastating disappointment came crashing back into her consciousness, without mercy.

She remembered clearly how the man had pushed the score folder away in that basement studio. She remembered the cold sentence that had cut straight through her heart without mercy. No matter which corner of the earth she tried to flee to—whether behind the grand Baroque architecture lining the Ringstraße, or inside classical practice rooms steeped in the history of legendary composers—the name Rimba Arya Swara remained an eternal melody that kept looping endlessly through her head, refusing to fade.

Here, in a city where classical music was treated as the highest religion and perfection the standard of life, Michi ironically felt she had lost the most honest part of her musical identity. Without a pair of drumsticks in her hands, without the brutal thud of a snare drum in the Tirtodipuran underground studio, and without Rimba's tired smile and the scent of his sweet cedar soap beside her at the desk, she felt like nothing more than a porcelain doll walking around with no life in it at all.

One night, as she opened her large suitcase to tidy her clothes, her eyes caught sight, without meaning to, of the wood-carved pair of drumsticks she'd tucked away at the bottom of it—the exact same sticks she'd used on that final night of Midnight Frequency's farewell stage. Her fingers trembled as she ran them across the wood, worn smooth at the tips from the constant impact of rimshots, the grain still faintly holding the shape of her own grip. Memories of the cheering crowd, the glowing neon lights, and the absolute freedom she'd felt leading that indie band's rhythm suddenly surged up, sending her defenses crumbling all at once. She hugged the drumsticks tightly in the cold of her apartment room, crying silently without a sound, letting her tears soak into the wood.

The phone on her practice desk suddenly buzzed softly, breaking her out of her daydream. The screen lit up, displaying an incoming message notification from Genta, updating her on the progress of Midnight Frequency's demo album, nearly finished back in Jogja, complete with a photo of their studio looking as messy as ever. Michi stared at the screen for a long time, her eyes burning, watching the little photo of their cluttered studio like it belonged to a life she'd only imagined once. Her finger hovered hesitantly, nearly typing out a name in a different messaging app—a name whose profile she'd only been able to look at over the past month, never once brave enough to send a single line, afraid of being hated even more.

Does he still hate me that much? Was the wound I caused too deep for him to ever forgive? Michi thought bitterly, holding back the tightness pressing at her throat until her chest ached.

She closed her phone screen tightly shut, letting the last traces of the Chopin melody evaporate into the cold air of the quiet, empty practice room. Here, so far from Jogja, in the middle of a city that worshipped perfection, Michi learned the true meaning of regret: that the greatest wound in life isn't the moment a secret is exposed to the surface, but the moment we realize we've lost the one and only place our heart truly considered home.

She sat there a while longer after the message from Genta faded from her screen, the phone dark again in her lap, and let herself do the thing she rarely allowed anymore—simply miss him, without trying to fix it, without drafting another apology she wasn't brave enough to send. Outside her practice room window, the last of the autumn light was already fading into evening, and somewhere thousands of kilometers away, she wondered if he was thinking of her too, or if she had already become nothing more than a cautionary story he told himself to keep his guard up, a lesson learned the hard way and filed carefully away. She pressed the drumsticks once more against her chest before finally setting them back at the bottom of the suitcase, as if putting away that part of herself for the night was the only way she knew how to survive it.