It isn't warm and fuzzy. It isn't kind. It certainly isn't merciful. Oh, it can be- it can pretend to be all smooth corners and long tones, sweeping melodies that sound like cream to your ears. But beneath that soft and gentle exterior, it's as deadly and unforgiving as a pile of razor edged rocks at the end of a very, very long fall. It's like putting on a suit of barbed wire, all sharp and jagged and clawing. It doesn't let go until it's done with you, and even then it remains with you, a ghost, haunting the vague edges of your mind, replaying itself over and over again in your ears until you, like a poor, beaten dog, like a fool, go back to do it again.

It's a drug. A deadly, violent, powerful drug that catches you up in its throes and then flings you away, pulls you back, dashes you to glittering shards, and bashes you to pieces. Then it gathers you up, mixed and matched in all the wrong ways, and does it all over again. And then you go back for more when it's done. The sounds wrap around you in a stranglehold, and even though you can't breath, can't see, can't do anything but listen and feel, even though you know that if it doesn't let go, it will kill you, you hold onto it as tightly as it grasps you.

It's more than just sound. It's sensation, and emotion, and concentrated life, pouring out of wood and metal and flesh. It's the dizzying crescendo, crescendo, crescendo then SLAM! chord, major, minor, falling of seventh diminished, accents violent, shocking decrescendo, the quiet leaving you stunned as you recover to go back for another round as the melody moves on and leaves you trembling in relief and aching, aching need. Need to feel that euphoric wholeness, but you can't stop yet, because it isn't over and you're a part of it anyway, be it melody, harmony, countermelody, or baseline. It's the rise and fall of scales, the triumphant chords that define for that moment who and what you are- you are the music, the notes and nothing else. You are part of a whole that is so much more important than you alone- perspective isn't allowed here. It would kill you.

It's in the sweep of the crescendo and decrescendo, the violence of the staccatto, the majesty of unison breaking into the complete wonder of the chord. It's in the jerk, sweep, swoosh, jab of your right hand as your wrist threatens carpal-tunnel while your grip slides up and down the cheap fiberglass until it's all you can do to clench your fist and hold on tighter, because the music won't let you go and if you let go of it, you'll be lost. It's in the sharp bite of wires into your fingers, slicing, cutting, tearing calluses into fingertips that you will never bother to manicure again. It's the vibrations that run through you, starting in your hands and running through your chest down your spine and back up again. You are a conduit, a conductor for the sheer energy as over and over again you slash through accents like a knight on a battlefield cutting down foes, like a hawk swooping down on prey, you rock with the beat, sway with it, dance with it until it resonates in every fiber of your being.

And after a while there's nothing else. Just the notes on the page, the violin in your hands, the rise and fall and rise and rise of the music all around you. You forget, for a moment, that you hate the people around you, that in three and a half minutes you will be back to making snide comments about that girl over there, or that boy who always loses his glasses, or those two stand partners who are joined at the hip- all that is forgotten as the music takes over. Wrong notes are ignored, shaky rythyms bowled over; you aren't playing the notes, you are playing the music, the heart and soul of creation, and it doesn't matter if everything is exact-computable-perfect. It doesn't matter.

For those few glorious moments, it doesn't matter. It's in the music, and it brings you all together until there is no thinking, there is only playing, only sensation and sound and soul, and there is no need for anything else.

If there is a God, this is surely it.