I used to sing. I was the girl who sings- because she was alive, and that felt like reason enough. Where she was, her voice also was: threaded through grocery aisles, picnic grass, bus windows breathing open and shut. She sang folding laundry, sang the walk home, sang feelings before she had names for them. Singing was how she shared her heart. Music was her home. They sent her into the hallway once. too loud, too much, didn’t raise her hand. The school halls sang back at her, clean and bright, like the building itself was listening. Some acoustics feel like permission. An early childhood call with a friend, Over the Rainbow floating out of her, laughter on the other end. He called her Dorothy. He made her glow. She sang walking home, harmonies stitched together with friends, footsteps keeping time. She sang in choirs, on stages, inside stories where the ending was always sung aloud. Music wasn’t something she did. It was her. Then time moved differently. The world grew heavier to carry. People noticed, and life noticed too. There were looks, and comments, and days that asked her to be quieter, smaller, to fit more easily. So she sang a little less. Not all at once. Never all at once. Just fewer aisles, fewer moments without eyes. She learned to be smaller. Car only. Home only. Karaoke, sometimes, where singing came with rules. She would stand, and the first few notes would still the room. Just for a moment, people listened. And for a few hours, she aged backward into the girl who made music out of being. The girl who sings grew smaller. Not all at once. So slowly it felt like nothing at all. She lived on in passing moments, in memory, in the way music still knew her even when the world no longer did. And somewhere in that narrowing, I forgot that I am a song.
