Monday, 13 April 2009

• Lilly and the Cage.

    Tonight as the strangely yellow moon dipped behind a rain cloud I was sure I wanted to be writer.  Lord knows lately I've been racking up enough experience to inspire volumes of self indulgently written prose.  At first, with that last sentence I wrote "self indulgent prose" but then reconsidered.  The words themselves are not self indulgent.  They don't have their own life.  Then again, they do.  This is why even the idea of trying to put any of this down on paper is so entirely intimidating.  Writers, artists, musicians... how do they do what they do?  How do they put out into the world those phrases whispering around the darkest parts of their minds?  I know they must feel this.  I know it because I hear those whispers.  They distract me until I comply. 
    Someone called me a closet musician the other day.  My cork board is littered with scraps containing half written verses, but I don't need the papers to remember.  All of the words, every chord, I can't forget them anymore than I can leave my own body.  A closet musician... what I funny thing to say.  "Will you be coming out anytime soon?" he laughed.  My thought in response was far too incensed, "And put my love out there so you can touch her?!"
    I've been thinking about that comment for weeks, and I know now why it (pardon the pun) struck a chord.  After my grandfather and Uncle were killed- after Michael tore me to shreds- after Tahoe I went back to base without the usual songs on my shoulders.  What I had then was  a burden too heavy, too large to leave room for expression.  I promised myself I would not share my creations anymore.  Somehow, it was not just my music that slipped into the dark.  Everything linked to feeling was shut away.  My poems were moved into a wooden box, my music was saved for an empty house, and my writing was kept to fragments- undeveloped, under appreciated, unusable pieces of trash.   
    So it should come as no surprise, seven years later, when she called me "songbird" I began to cry.  She asked me why I was crying, and I told her the stories.  I told her about the days when everyone called me songbird.  I told her about the music filling the hallways of my barracks.  She recognized something in me I had tried so desperately to hide, and when she did I had no reason to pretend.  So, I took out my papers and held them up to her.  I took down my guitar, and uncovered my piano and played for her.  I sang my heart into a room where there was more than a wall to hear me.  I had been so afraid of expression.  For so many years I protected these things- I protected myself- from observation, from criticism, from change... from molestation.  When I finally opened the darkness up to the light again I looked onto all that had been locked away, and I did not feel afraid anymore.
  
    I felt joy.
  
  This is the song I wrote for her:
  
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  I was asleep
  I didn’t know
  I never saw my eyes were closed
  You arrested me
  Awakening
  It is strange to stretch these weary legs
  Weird, getting out of my own head
  Dreaming, finally
  Awakening
  You prove one heart can change everything
  One kind word can make it spring
  The summer comes
  I am different than I was
  
  Now that the world is bright and new
  What is a dreamer left to do?
  Take me away
  Awakening
  Clouds are caught within the sky
  A bird can only fly so high
  Love is weightlessly
  Awakening
  You prove one heart can change everything
  One kind word can make it spring
  The summer comes
  I am different than I was

  
  

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