Igo and the Silence He Heard

In Amsterdam, even the rain knows how to make music. It taps on the rooftops like the drums of some forgotten African jazz, and whistles through bicycle spokes like a flute that’s slightly out of tune. It was in such a city that Igo was born and lived — a twenty-year-old musician who no longer loved sound.

He hadn’t always been that way. Once, he played the guitar, wrote songs on bridges, slept to the hum of passing trains, and dreamed of recording an album made entirely from the noises of the city. But then — everything turned gray. Sounds stopped being music. They became dust. As if someone had replaced his inner symphony with the dull hum of a refrigerator.

Depression didn’t come like a storm — it dripped. Day by day, drop by drop. As if someone was slowly stealing parts of him, leaving only hollow spaces that filled with cold. He stopped writing. He stopped hearing. And so — on a sleepless night, when even the streets of Amsterdam felt too quiet — he randomly found a website: WorkAway. He clicked, not knowing what he was looking for. Only that he needed to leave a city where the sounds had died.

A farm. Southern France. “Vegetarian commune with yoga and meditation practice.” He didn’t know why he chose it. Only that something told him: go.

A week later, he stood among vineyards. The soil was warm, the air like fresh bread, and the people — strangely quiet. No one spoke of productivity. No one asked, “What do you do with your life?” In the morning they breathed. During the day, they dug. In the evenings, they sat in silence drinking herbal tea made from basil and lavender.

Off to the side of the main house stood a small ashram — a white building, like a seashell resting on the slope of a hill. It was nearly empty. Just mats, candles, and windows without glass. Igo began going there at dusk. At first, he just sat. Then, he breathed. And slowly — he began to hear.

Not outwardly. Inwardly. As though strings inside him were beginning to vibrate again. First one. Then another. Not a melody. But a silence in which music lived.

One night, he dreamt he was a tree, and sound flowed through his branches. He woke up and walked barefoot into the garden. The stars were as large as apples. The leaves whispered. And his heart — wasn’t beating. It was singing.

The heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and thanks to that artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.

— Gabriel García Márquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores

That’s when Igo understood — what he had thought was an ending, was only a pause. Like in music: the silence between notes. Without that pause, no song ever sounds honest.

Now he’s back in Amsterdam. In his backpack, a handful of soil from the farm. In his mind, the silence he once heard. And on his laptop — the first tracks of a new album. He’s writing it slowly. Not for fame. But to remember how it feels when you finally come back to yourself.