If you were to ask people what the worst feeling in the world is, they might say sadness. They might say fear. They might say embarrassment, anger, dejection. You might think these would all be perfectly good answers, because after all, isn't it a matter of opinion? But they'd be wrong: it's failure.

Because that, I think, is what inescapably destroys you. It's that singular and unmistakable feeling that you get in that moment when you realize that you've failed. Your mind searches for any other way. It looks for a door, a window, a crack in the wall, anything. But of course there's nothing; it's the terrible certainty of failure that's the worst. No way for you to see out. No way for anyone else to see in, even if they try.

And Henry - always loyal Henry - well, he tried after my disastrous recital. He said all the right things, and I tried to do the right things, too. I nodded and even made an attempt at a smile. He stared at me dubiously, turning his head a little to one side and saying, "Why are you making that face?"

I couldn't explain it. It's impossible to explain when you've worked up most of your life to one thing, and then it's gone, just like that. It's impossible to explain how you've never once, in sixteen years, had a dream that wasn't framed by putting as much distance between your home and yourself, to explain how most of those dreams involved superpowers and easy exits, but this dream was true and beautiful and real.

How do you find a new dream when the one you've always had is destroyed? You don't. You can't.

I couldn't, anyway. I couldn't bring myself to even look at the keys, lined up so perfectly, waiting to be played in a way that had once held so much promise for me. I'd sit in front of the piano, trying to will myself to open the lid over the keys. It never happened. Henry would wait in the hall to drive me home - maybe waiting to hear if I would play something, so that he could rush in when he heard music, like Annie Sullivan when Helen Keller spoke - but every day he'd peer into the practice room after a little while with a tentative smile and asking if I was ready to go. And I always was.

My dad rolled out the old upright piano that I used to practice on when I first started lessons. I don't think he expected me to notice how deliberate and obvious it was, as if I would think he had just happened to find it laying around. Night after night, I'd pointedly ignore its presence, until finally he couldn't take it anymore and tapped the table one evening, apparently trying to think of what to say.

"You know, Natalie, it wouldn't kill you to keep practicing."

"You know what else wouldn't kill me? Cutting off my pinky with a serrated knife. That doesn't mean I want to try either."

"You used to really enjoy it."

I sigh, loudly, because what's the point of a sigh if no one hears it? "Oh," I say, "In that case."

I sit down and he watches me with his arms folded as I spread my fingers slowly and deliberately out over the keys. The seconds drag on, seeming like hours of silence with his eyes on the back of my head and my heart pounding loudly in my ears, but not loudly enough to drown out the memory of my own voice. You know what the problem with classical is?

I can't do it.

I push away from the piano, with it pushing away the memory of failure. "I don't want to." I say.

"Ever since your recital -"

"You weren't there."

"You know I would have been there if I could have been."

"Yeah." I can't keep a sarcastic edge from creeping into my voice.

"I know it must have been hard to do it alone."

"I wasn't. Alone." I stop myself. Ever since the dinner fiasco, I don't like to mention Henry. Best to keep him as far away from my family as possible.

See, my mom is nuts. Not in a quirky, let's-go-wild way, but in a legitimate, straitjacket kind of way. A lot of people who don't know her that well find this amusing. I don't.

It's not funny when your mom sends you off to second grade with mismatched knee socks, a neon jumper, and only one shoe. It's even less funny when you try to tell her and she yells at you, then cries all the way to school so you can't wait to get out of the car, knee socks and all. And it becomes utterly humorless when it goes on for years. Henry is the first normal thing that's happened to me since I got a cat in the seventh grade, and I won't taint that with the mess that is my family.

"Who was there?"

"Henry." I mumble. "It's not a big deal." I take a deep breath and am surprised to find it shaking. "Actually, dad, I think I'm going to head over to his house. I mean, if you don't mind."

He raises an eyebrow, surprised. I never ask permission. I usually just tell him I'm going. This is the closest to asking I've come to asking permission in a long while.

"Just be home by ten."

I grab my coat and decide to walk. It's not that far to Henry's, and despite it being February, the cold air feels nice, especially after the stifling heat of my house. Still, by the time I reach his, I'm looking forward to getting inside.

I knock on the door and wait, shifting from foot to foot. Henry's mom answers the door. She's a quiet woman, small and with very little resemblance to her son, but there's something about her that I've always liked. A strength, perhaps. Something that reminds me of the way my mom could have been.

"Henry's not here."

Just the words that I needed to hear. Henry's mom doesn't offer a further explanation, and so I mutter a thank you and sit on the steps after she closes the door. If she is in fact anything like my mom, then she's probably watching me from the window, contemplating whether or not to call the police and report an intruder on her front steps. Well, too fucking bad. I don't really have anyplace else to go.

I don't know how long I sit there for - ten minutes, a half hour, an hour, freezing - but eventually I hear Henry's unmistakable stuttering engine coming up the street, followed by the sight of his ugly rusted car coming into view as it rolls slowly up his driveway. It's getting dark; he gets out of the car, and all I can see clearly is his old baseball cap, but even that makes me feel a little better.

"What's this?" He asks, stopping just short of the steps. "Where's your car? Or did UPS drop you off just for me?"

I don't crack a smile. I don't think I know how. "I walked."

"Oh." Henry drops down onto the step, next to me. That's the thing about Henry - he doesn't push. He takes what he's given and he doesn't force a change. "So...do you need a ride home?"

The sky is almost completely black now, the light above Henry's steps the only thing keeping the inky night at bay. I breathe in the biting air deeply, considering it, but I don't want to go back, not yet.

"You think I walked here for the exercise?"

He laughs, and, suddenly exhausted, I drop my head onto the soft fabric of his jacket. I realize that today was a day I would have been able to take in stride a year ago. It might have even been a good day, all things considered. And yet, here I am, and I can't decide if that's a good or bad thing. If I'm stronger or weaker than I was.

"C'mon, Nat, what's wrong?"

"Right this second? I'm cold. Freezing, actually."

"That's easily remedied."

He jangles his keys and opens the door, and gratefully I step inside, slipping off my coat. As soon as I adjust to my surroundings - the small front room, decorated only with old wallpaper and a bookshelf crammed with books - I hear something. Music. Franz Liszt's Liebestraum, to be exact.

"What's that?"

"Oh." Henry hangs up his coat on the coat rack, shoving his hands in his pockets and looking embarrassed. "I think it's my mom."

He turns toward the hallway, but I place a hand on his arm, stopping him. I'm transfixed by the music. "Is it a CD?"

He gives me a strange look. "Uh, no. I told you my mom gave me lessons."

"I didn't think you meant she was actually your teacher. I've never heard anyone playing here."

"Well," he says, "My dad doesn't really like the noise. But he's not home." Henry takes my arm and pushes me gently down the hallway into another small room, one that I've never been in. It's decorated just as sparsely as the front one, but littered with sheet music around a piano bench, on which Henry's mom plays.

The notes flow just as easily from her as they do when Henry improvises, but they're in perfect order, familiar and yet strangely new to my ears. I close my eyes, but as soon as I do, the music stops as she notices us standing there.

"Oh, Natalie," she says, her hands flying off the keys to her face, "Did you wait outside that whole time? I would have invited you in."

"It's fine."

She flutters around the room, tsking at Henry for not telling her that they would have company and picking up the papers, stacking them neatly before heading back down the hallway.

"Do you want to play?" Henry offers, looking at the piano hopefully.

It's so rigid and structured.

"No." I say firmly.

But suddenly the room seem so empty without the notes filling it, so hollow I can hardly stand it. I sit down at the bench and look at the keys in front of me, for the second time that night spreading my fingers over them.

You have to play the notes on the page. There's no room for...

I push all thoughts out of my mind. I don't touch the sheet music - I don't need it after the hours I spent.

I play.

I play for what seems like hours but must truly have only been minutes. I play my recital piece, Mozart filling the room from ceiling to floor and wall to wall, and somewhere along the line I stop playing it and pick up something new, something I've never played before and don't even know.

Improvisation.

But unlike at the recital, I let this story take me where it's going to with no fear of the outcome. I play from the heart instead of the mind, and when I'm done and look up as if waking from a deep sleep, I know that I have just told my life through music.

I take a breath that I hadn't realized I was holding, with the weight of my realization on my shoulders.

"Henry," I say, even though my voice sounds almost far away, "Will you help me?"

"With what?"

"I need to pick out a piece for next year's recital."

Henry smiles at me, a true, real smile to fit my true, real dream, and I think that maybe, just maybe, I've found my window.