This force made me drop my suitcase and pushed me up the stairs to the fourth floor. Amazed and confused, I smiled, until I realized where this force was taking me, to the antique piano. I found myself face to face with the thing, trying to push the force from sitting me down on the stool my grandpa died on. I shuddered at the thought of sitting where my grandpa had been last. The thing was evil or haunted for all I knew. Then, his voice filled my ears.

“Go,” he said calmly. “Go, go to the piano.”

I stiffened up as a shadow of his face glided across the piano's keys. I pushed myself backward. The more I strolled backward, the brighter the shiny, beautiful keys would glow. A shiver ran down my neck. The pulling force was coming back. It grew stronger as I pushed myself backward, trying to avoid sitting down.

“NO!” I screamed, and suddenly all I heard was grandpa’s humming to one of the old songs he used to write.

“Come on Rose,...” his voice soothed me.

I sat down, and memories of Grandpa and me flashed before my eyes. I heard a baby’s laugh that couldn’t be anyone else's but mine and watched as baby me and Grandpa made a sandcastle at the beach in South Carolina. I watched us grow older together, every time my family and I visited him flashed before my eyes. But, I noticed, as time passed by, he looked more worried and drearier. I felt a pit in my stomach that started at the size of a marble grow into a boulder. I have never experienced the feeling of watching yourself grow up and watch the person you love more than anyone else age. If only I could capture those moments and go back in time.

Then, I heard my little 6-year-old self, “What’s wrong Grandpa?” I asked as my grandpa, and I ate lunch at our favorite restaurant in South Carolina when I revisited him. He looked depressed and petrified, with big, dark circles under his eyes, swallowing the happiness out of them.

“Nothing honey,” he answered quickly and gently. “I love you,” he croaked sadly.

“I love you too Grandpa,” I said happily, for my 6-year-old self knew nothing but the world how I saw it, and that was wonderful. So much has changed.

His face faded before my eyes when I noticed a tear slip down my cheek (get back in there I thought), but a warmth like never before filled my heart with those last words I had just heard from him. So, I daringly put my hands on the keys. Grandpa gave me the attention I never got from my parents, and that’s why it was hard for me to believe he was gone.

The keys felt cool under my hot sweating hands, and I played a note. It was high and mighty, and the old, rusty key seemed to rejoice. I noticed the stand attached to the piano was holding music pieces, handwritten it looked like.

“These music pieces must be the ones Grandpa told me about,” I whispered. My heart soared looking at my grandpa’s old studio.

“Rose! Did you put your things away?” my mom whined.

“Yes, mom!” I yelled with an annoyed tone in my voice thinking about the suitcase lying in my new bedroom. I rolled my eyes, my parents are just a pain in the butt.

“Come on Robert,” I heard her mutter to my dad.

Grandpa used to obsess over music; all he would talk about was the next piece of music he would write. Sometimes he would hum to me what he thought the harmony should be in his next song, always a wonderful group of notes, powerful almost like words. I picked up a music piece called “Castle In My Dreams.” I remembered Grandpa telling me about this song, humming the tune. I played what I guessed was the first note. It didn’t sound right. I tried every other note until the note on the music page lit up a beautiful gold. I gasped as the note faded out to the pitch black ink color it was before when I tried to play the next note but failed. A rush of excitement flooded through my body like venom spreads after a rattlesnake bites you.

“Rose! Come to clean up down here,” my mom yelled from downstairs.

“Why can’t you do it?!” I yelled back, knowing my two parents were probably just on their computers with some weird, random objects in front of them, “I am doing something!”

“Ok, but if you have not cleaned up by nightfall you are in big trouble.”

I sighed as I returned to the piano.

“I’m not kidding!” my mom screamed as I shut the attic door.

“Keep going,” I heard a scruffy, gruff voice in my head whisper. “Continue on.”

I nodded in return, and for the rest of the day, I tried to learn the notes of the song till every note on the paper had turned that beautiful gold, separately.

I picked myself up from the stool of the piano and dragged myself down the stairs to make myself dinner. I just wanted to go to bed. I picked up an old box of Trix my parents bought for the ride here and grabbed a plastic spoon from a cabinet. I sat myself down at one of the desks in the middle of the kitchen and ate my dry cereal. I went up the stairs and toppled onto my new bed, falling asleep right there, with no pillow, pajamas or good dinner.