The first complete draft of this etude. I was less focused on meaning and more focused on practicing composition itself.

Compositional Etude No. 1 in D Minor for Cello

**Draft 

When writing this, an image in motion consumed the mind and heart inside me: a human doomed to a depth beneath those depths which humans ought to be damned to, ever sinking lower still. Escape as he envisions is futile; this truth if nothing else he knows is fundamental, and yet he tries to climb from the mire, falling down and trying again as if his failure prompted more still, or his effort defined his will to live. Alas he falls to the greatest depth of all: despair.
A gleeful girl with caution approaches, and after empathetic coercion is able to bring him up to his knees, but in trying to raise him to his feet she absorbs the sadness that sunk him so, and she too falls into the place with no hope.

Varun Malladi