KEATING

Hear it?

Carpe. Carpe Diem. Seize the day boys,

make your lives extraordinary.

We had just finished watching Dead Poets Society. I told my dad that I wanted “carpe diem” to be my life motto. He smiled, then told me his own: “후회 없이 살자” – live without regrets. Still shaken by Neil’s death, I hadn’t given it much thought at the time. But now, years later, those words echo back with unsettling clarity: if I don’t seize the moment in my own way, I may carry a single, unshakable regret for the rest of my life – and it would trace back to my dad.   

Music has been an integral part of my identity for as long as I can remember. Neither of my parents are musicians, so my anomalous passion for it always felt inexplicable.  

I was only two when my parents had put a toy guitar in my room. I sang my mom’s favorite song while strumming unintelligible chords. Four, they had bought a piano. They didn’t know it at the time, but that same piano would be my ticket to a recital in Carnegie Hall. By age nine I was in an orchestra: sight-reading difficult pieces on my cello when others were struggling with scales. Every performance, my dad would sit in the front row, camera in hand, arms twitching, sweat dripping – but smiling, he’d watch.

My father has a bachelor’s degree in computer science. When I tell people around me that one of my parents is a professor, they tend to give me more respect. But the respect he should be receiving can’t come from an empty title. It comes from mornings where I’d push open his door to find only a faint warmth left in the bedsheets, his backpack already gone. After school, I’d return home to the same silence – monitor dark, the indent of his weight carved into the cushion of his chair. 

Success, for him, meant vanishing before dawn and returning before dusk. And it’s due to this relentless cycle, because of the invisible hours I never saw but always felt, that so much of my success is owed to him. 

I remember asking him to buy me a couple classic books back in fourth grade – books I had no interest in – just so he would feel like his efforts weren’t wasted. Looking back, I see now that these small gestures were my way of trying to acknowledge what he’s done for me, even if I didn’t fully understand it at the time. 

——

Ten years old, I attended one of his lectures. It was a beginner’s start to ‘C’. Firing up my laptop and placing my hands on the keyboard, I listened intently to this new side to him I hadn’t seen before and concentrated with all my might. 

#include<stdio.h>

The first line of code I wrote.

The same line of code I would write over a thousand times.

11 years old, I was writing and debugging my first real program. A complex calculator app that refused to calculate the square root. Line after line. Semicolon after semicolon. Error after error. Success, when it came, felt too quiet. A dark terminal spitting out the correct answer. Functional? Yes. Beautiful? No.

—

Ten years old, I signed up for piano lessons. It was a beginner’s start to the piano. I placed my tiny fingers on the piano, and followed along intently and concentrated with all my might. 

Mi re do re mi mi mi

The first song I would play.

A song I would never play again. 

11 years old, I was rehearsing for my first contest. The same passage was repeated over a hundred times, but each time I replayed it, it grew brighter, more alive. When I finally stepped onto the stage, I felt a sense of comfort. The lights burned warm and even my mistakes felt deliberate. A beautiful chaos of applause roared back at me.

The parallels ended there. Programming taught me how to build, but not how to feel. Music taught me both. 

Both fields shaped me, but only one felt like I was seizing the day.

—  

INT. BASEMENT - NIGHT

Dim light. A lightbulb hums above the instrument room. Posters of bands peel at the corners, amps stacked across the walls.

On the floor: Scattered music, tangled cables, an open laptop with code frozen mid-completion

CHANJUN is behind the drum kit. 

BOOM. BOOM. CRASH.

The sticks hit harder with every strike. The rhythm is wild, alive – like it’s trying to crawl out of his chest.

CHANJUN’s head sways with the beat. Sweat trickles down his temple. 

Then…

DAD (O.S.)

CJ! Time for test prep!

The beat doesn’t stop.

DAD (O.S.) (Sharper)

CJ! Did you hear me? Upstairs. Now.

CHANJUN slams the cymbals one last time. From upstairs, the faint tapping of his dad’s keyboard echoes along the hallway. 

CHANJUN grips his sticks tighter. His arms shake – not from exhaustion, but from the conflicting weight pressing in on both sides: drums or duty.

His foot hovers atop the bass pedal. One more hit would be a surrender.

But it never comes. He puts the sticks down.

Gently.

—

But then I had lost a single day. Stupid and ordinary – one that shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. I had forgotten to sign up for the AP test. The deadline circled on the calendar passed me by, and with it the argument as well.

My parents’ reaction was immediate, sharp, and felt like a snare had snapped me down. My mom fired first: “What are you even going to be if you can’t even get something as simple as this right?”

Her anger was red, fiery, and fierce. But my dad’s words – they didn’t shoot at me. While the piercing arrows that my mom had fired had bled me dry, he had shot a dull poison arrow. 

“I know people in the music industry,” he said slowly. His eyes slowly met mine. “They live painfully. They spend so much time making music for money they don’t even find enjoyment in doing it anymore.”

The AP test was no longer the issue. His voice turned it into something deeper. And in that moment, I felt the floor tilting beneath me. 

The words dug in like nails in soft wood. They live painfully. They live painfully. They live painfully. The phrase didn’t leave after he did. It lingered on. It pulsed. It circled. It pushed into the fluids in my brain and tied itself up so tightly I couldn’t pull it away. I pictured faceless musicians. Pianists barely making their way through an endless stream of notes just to make ends meet. 

And yet, music was the only thing that didn’t feel like pain. The constant repetition wasn’t the stick – it was the carrot. When I played, I didn’t feel in pain at all. Each wrong note was a door to a better one. Each hour of practice wasn’t something that was stolen from me – it was something that was given.

But that whisper was weak. Drowned out by the louder voice in my head telling me that I owed him. Every memory of my father shot out at me. Tuition checks signed without complaint. Expressionless, bleary bloodshot eyes staring at computer screens at 2 a.m. He had already lived through enough pain for me. How could I choose a path that only promised him more suffering? 

Music began to feel like theft. Computer science became repayment. And I was clawing at that choice, suffocating between two betrayals: betraying him… or betraying myself. 

I dragged my feet back to my room. I stared at the calendar on my desk. The red ink circled yesterday’s date. It was mocking me. I thought about ‘carpe diem,’ about seizing the day. But all I could think about was that every day I seized would be a day stolen from him. 

The bed swallowed me, my body heavy with weight on my shoulders. Sleep came late, and when it finally arrived, it felt undeserved. 

—

But unlike Neil, I woke up. I woke up with my fathers words still hammering through my skull. My own motto gnawing its way through me, with no resolution in sight. Maybe that’s the difference. Neil never got the chance to live without regrets because he never got the chance to fight them. His silence was final. 

Mine is not. 

The notes hang unresolved, dissonant. They vibrate in the air long after the song has ended. I don’t know if they’ll ever resolve. I only know I can still hear them.

NEIL

I found it. 

TODD

You found what? 

NEIL

What I wanna do right now. What's 

really, really inside me.