When all is erased, what’s left? What’s left of me? “You’re confusing your true self with your ego,” they would say. “The ego is a tightly wrapped knot of past pain that we’re trying to unravel together. And by unravelling it you are helping not just yourself but the whole of humanity to move on from eons of accumulated sorrow and hurt and anger and bitterness and resentment that leads to fear and persecution and violence. Don’t you want us to be from all that?” I could hear those evening lectures playing in my head with no difficulty. There was no harsh texture trying to sand them out of existence. But every time I tried to think back to before this time, if there even was a before this time, I met with the same resistance. There was only one road back. The music. The strings of melodies and rhythms that coiled together into a thick rope that pulled me back to…to…