My grandmother used to love to tell stories about me. One of her favorites was about me when I was three, maybe four, years old. I was staying with her while my parents were off somewhere, and she had to take me to the dentist. I sat in the waiting room while she went into her appointment. When she came back to the waiting room, I was singing to myself. I saw my grandmother come in, ended my song, and everyone in the waiting room applauded. I hadn't even noticed they were there.
When I was a child, I would sing everywhere. I would sing in the grocery store. I would sit at my grandmother's piano and make up lyrics as I slowly picked notes on the piano. I imagined the hearth of her fireplace to be my stage and I would sing to imaginary friends. When I got into school, I sang in the school performances. Somewhere, there is video of me singing "All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth." Yes, my front teeth were missing.
My father, a musician among many gifts, always encouraged my love of music. He gave me a tiny guitar to practice on. He would let me play his pipes and recorders. He would let me play his drums. By the age of 14, he had me recording demos of songs he'd written because I had a stronger voice than the woman who fronted his band - I just couldn't get into bars. I sang everywhere else though.
Somewhere, that all stopped. I stopped performing. My voice shrank. Instead of being powerful, it is now pretty. For a long time, I stopped connecting with music. More and more, I find you can't leave behind your first love. It won't let you. At sometime in my tiny toddler life, music carved a place in my heart. My love for music may have slept for a bit, but now it's wide awake. There are times I turn off the lights and lay on my bed and just let the music make love to me. There are certain pieces of music I cannot make love to because of the way the music makes me feel. I feel like I can't breathe. I feel like my body isn't my own and it moves how it wants to. I close my eyes and I just feel every vibration in the air.
There is a particular song that moves me in a way I can't remember a piece of music ever having made me feel. I want a man who can make love to me like that song sounds, which is precisely why I will never have sex to that song. If I play it for someone who I believe could live up to making me feel the way my song sounds, and he fails, the song will be forever linked to that man. More importantly, my song will be forever linked to his failures in comparison to my song. On the other hand, I am terrified of the man who can live up to the promises that song makes me. I know I'll love him. I will love him for making me feel like my song does. While I think it would be a beautiful thing to fall in love with and to, I also feel like I would be cheating on my first lover. In the movie of my mind, the perfect man will make love to me to a soundtrack of this song and I will fall in love with him and he will love me and this song becomes our song together. Our bliss. How often does that happen though? If he can't or won't love me back, I will be left with his connection to my song. I am terrified of lying in bed, alone, in the dark, trying to connect with my song and remembering the way that man would make love to me to this song. I'm not terrified of falling in love. I'm not terrified of losing someone I do love. What is terrifying to me is to lose my song, my bliss. I'm too protective of my true love to ever let that happen.
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