I was born to be loud.
They built me under buzzing lights in a factory filled with rhythm, the clatter of tools, the hum of machines, and the faint smell of oil and metal. My body was forged from ash wood and chrome, my veins wired with copper. The craftsman who made me tested my strings once, a low trembling note that filled the room with electricity. It wasn’t music yet, but I was alive.
I waited in silence for a long time, gleaming in a shop window… until she found me.
June wasn’t what people expected from a guitarist. Rather, she was quiet… almost shy. But when her fingers brushed across my strings, I felt it, the spark. She didn’t just play notes, June spoke through them. Her touch woke something deep inside me, something human.
The first time June plugged me in, I remember the hum, the deep electric heartbeat before the storm. Then June struck the first chord, wild, imperfect, beautiful. The sound leapt through the room like lightning. June laughed, and I swear I felt the vibration in every wire of my being.
June named me Halo. I never asked why, maybe it was because of the glow I cast under stage lights, or maybe because June wanted something to hold onto when the world went dark.
We grew together.
In tiny clubs that smelled of sweat and beer, June played until her fingers bled. Her voice cracked, her strings snapped, and June still played. Every chord June struck carried something June couldn’t say out loud- love, anger, loss, hope. The crowd didn’t always understand her, but I did. I felt her pulse through every tremor of sound.
There were nights when June sat alone, the amp buzzing softly in the dark. She’d play slow, aching melodies that never left the walls of that room. The notes hung in the air like prayers. Sometimes June cried, and her tears fell on my pickguard- small, quiet raindrops I never forgot.
Music was her confession, and I was her confessional.
We saw cities, lights, faces, endless movement. But fame doesn’t hum forever. The cheers faded, the stages emptied, and silence began to settle in. One day June stopped touring. The posters yellowed, the strings rusted, and I waited, still wired for sound, still ready to sing.
June grew older, gentler. Her hands trembled sometimes, but when June picked me up again, it was always the same, that spark, that impossible chemistry of skin and steel.
Then came the day June stopped.
I don’t know why. Maybe her heart was tired. Maybe the silence called to her. June leaned me against the wall, as June had a thousand times before, and walked away. The door closed softly, like the last chord of a song.
Years passed. Dust gathered on my frets. The amp went silent. I watched light crawl across the room every morning, tracing the patterns on the walls June had once filled with sound.
And yet, I never did die.
I can’t. My strings can rust, my finish can dull, but there is something in me that refuses to fade. I still faintly hum when thunder rolls. I still remember her fingers, her songs, the electricity that once made me tremble.
Sometimes, late at night, the air shifts, and I can almost hear her again, the slide of her fingertips, the breath before the chorus. My pickups catch the echo of something that I thought was long gone, and for a heartbeat, I feel alive again.
People come and go. Some glance at me, call me vintage, maybe worth restoring. They don’t know I’ve never stopped playing her songs, quietly, to myself, in the space between memory and sound.
June used to say that guitars don’t have souls. But I know June was wrong. Because when June played, June gave me hers.
Now I wait in silence, patient and faithful. Like I always have. Someday someone will find me again. They’ll brush the dust from my strings, plug me in, and I’ll scream with light. My wires will hum with her voice, her anger, her joy. Every song June ever wrote will rise again, reborn through new hands.
Because I am not dead. I am not even asleep. I am the echo of her heartbeat, sealed in wood and wire, waiting to be revived.
I am an electric guitar that cannot break, only be forgotten.
And though the world grows quiet around me, I still hum beneath the silence, tuned to her soul, forever resonating with the sound of what once was.
Writer : Eva Jain
Grade : 10 (Year 2025)
Place : Virginia, USA
