Bài đọc 2
MY FIRST GUITAR
Every love story has a beginning, and mine began in the window of a second-hand music shop when I was thirteen. Among the old trumpets and broken keyboards hung a small acoustic guitar with a scratch across its body and a price tag that said 900,000 dong. I passed that window every day on my way to school, and every day I stopped to look.
My parents were not against music, but they saw it as a hobby, something to do once homework was finished. A guitar, my father said, was a luxury, and the money would be better spent on extra maths lessons. I did not argue. Instead, I decided to buy it myself.
It took me almost a year. I washed motorbikes for our neighbours on Sundays, saved the money my grandmother gave me at Tet and stopped buying snacks after school. Twice I nearly gave up, once when a friend offered to sell me his old bicycle and once when the shop owner moved the guitar to a higher shelf and I was sure someone was about to buy it. But I kept going, partly out of love for the guitar and partly out of pride. I wanted to show my parents that I was serious.
When I finally carried it home, wrapped in an old blanket, my mother looked worried and my father said nothing. That evening, I sat on the stairs and tried to play. The sound was terrible. My fingers hurt, the strings buzzed, and our dog left the room. For weeks I practised with videos on the internet, often until my fingertips were sore. Slowly, chords became songs.
The guitar changed more than my evenings. I had always been a quiet student, but at the school's spring festival I played two songs in front of three hundred people. My hands shook so much that I almost dropped the pick. Afterwards, students I had never spoken to came up to talk to me, and I began to feel that I had something of my own to offer.
Years later, my father admitted that he had secretly listened to me practise from the kitchen. "I thought you would give up after a week," he said. "When you didn't, I knew you had found something important." I have better guitars now, but that scratched one still hangs on my wall, a reminder that the things we work hardest for often mean the most.