The song was a whisper now. It had to be. A wife, a child, the quiet hum of a house at night - they demanded a different kind of silence. The monkey was still there, of course, but it was smaller. It no longer rattled the cage. Now it just sat in the corner of his mind, a shadow.

He thought he had tamed it, that it had learned to be a part of the family.

But the old hunger returned, not for the art, but for something he couldn't name. It was the commute, the endless meetings, the work that paid the bills but left a hollow ache where his voice used to be. The ink dried on the shelf. The charcoal dust settled.

He was a man with a mortgage, not a painter with a song.

And the monkey, no longer a frantic beast, was now lost. It didn't gnaw or scrape. It just watched. It had no song to sing for this new life. It didn't know what to do with the quiet despair of a job that felt wrong or the weight of a family he loved so deeply but for whom he felt he was a different, smaller man. He was carrying a ghost now, not a monkey. A silent witness to a life he was building, a life that seemed to have no room for the terrible, beautiful song he once knew.

He was unchained from his art, and the freedom felt like a cage.