The Vintage Guitar by Aaron Buchwald

Hunter settled into a comfortable, albeit, numbed, routine in middle-age, when he digs out his old vintage guitar. Touching the wood, feeling the contours and playing the instrument ignites passions from his teenage years. He tries to appreciate the beauty of the tones for themselves outside the confines of his finely quantified-life of labels and appraisals. But he's awoken long forgotten dreams and practicing alone at home, where nobody can hear, isn't enough. He's programmed by decades of repetition to seek external validation and thus finds himself teetered on the edge of the event-horizon, subject to the gravitational pull that threatens to suck him back into the black-hole where he's been hiding.