It was a day like any other, the fine sands shifting through my feet, the cool water brushing up and over them as the tide came and went. It was beautiful, it truly was. But I had walked this endless beach every day for as long as I could remember, and I was tired. I was tired of the seeing the same sands, the same waves, and the same sounds of those waves crashing on those sands. With no one to listen to them with, with nothing else in sight to let me escape their constant occupying of my thoughts, you could say I hated them. Everyday I grew to hate them more, the prison I couldn’t even remember entering. I hated not knowing what I done to get here, to this faux paradise. I knew I was a good man, never stepped out of line, always did what my parents said would lead me to happiness and a good life. Where were they now? Probably wondering their own beach, I suppose I walked and walked for a number of days that I didn’t bother to count, on the sands I still despised. However, on one of those days, my second most wonderful day, to be precise, an intricate golden piano appeared as I crested over one of the millions of soft hills on that beach. So elegant it was—so deeply I was relieved. I ran to it, as fast as I had run since I had tried to escape the sands on the first day I had arrived. I used to play as a child. The joy of those memories were some of the only ones that sometimes poked through the endless beach as I walked. The last song I had learned rushed to my fingertips hovering over the shiny white and blacks of the instrument. Without anymore thought, I started playing. It was the same playing my mother had said wouldn’t get me anywhere in life. The same playing my father said wouldn’t support help mr support my family. And the playing my grandmother had paid for me to have with her warm and ill heart before she passed. She said she did it because it made me happy. Well, I could say I was finally happy again. The song flowed out of my mind and through my fingers and into the keys. The sands faded away whilst I was occupied bobbing the piano’s pedal at my feet, and the crashes of the waves were drowned out by the triumphant sounds ringing out in the air. I played for hours that day, and the next, and the next after that. I played and played everyday on that beach, the piano was always in the same spot, and it never missed a day since it had first appeared. I wondered if it had always been there all along, waiting for me to hate the sands I walked enough for me to finally see it. On one day, the most beautiful day of my life, a day that would have made my grandmother cry tears of pride and joy, I opened my eyes after I had finished playing and no longer saw the waters on the horizon, nor the dunes that continued with no end. No, on this day, when I opened my eyes, I opened them to an applause, from a room full of people who had stopped enjoying their meals to instead enjoy my playing more. The sands had now gone, and what replaced them was a life. A life that was actually worth living.