The Girl Must Speak, The Song Must Be Sung

I wrote The One I Never Grieved the other day, fully feeling it, letting go the boy, looking to the man as our paths crossed again.

But something has been holding me, a pain I cannot shake.

And damn this Richard Marx obsession, playing a soundtrack to an ache so deep it could make the world implode.

I think about you every time
I take a breath in then
I let it go
I remember when you were mine
But you were just a dream
I used to hold

Now there's no sleep
Cause every star
Is lighting up,
All of these memories haunting
Knowing there's so much of you I'm still wanting
Here with me
I pray for the dark
Cause if it comes
Maybe somehow I'll be alright
If I could just turn out the night

I think about the way you used to say my name
And how it made me feel everything
Now am looking for any way
To make it through until
The morning

But there's no sleep
Cause every star
Is lighting up,
All of these memories haunting
Knowing there's so much of you I'm still wanting
Here with me
I pray for the dark
Cause if it comes
Maybe somehow I'll be alright
If I could just turn out the night

If only I
Could just close my eyes
I'll finally be over you

But there's no sleep
Cause every star
Is lighting up,
All of these memories haunting
Knowing there's so much of you I'm still wanting
Here with me
I pray for the dark
Cause if it comes
Maybe somehow I'll be alright
If I could just turn out the night

So the song caught me, and I played it on repeat, singing it over and over and crying and feeling and wondering why because I wasn't actually conscious of any current longing like this. I pine for no one. I miss no one. I don't think I have met someone I would trust to hold me.

A brief detour: a couple of weeks ago I did some deep excavation of the mother wound during my contemplation of when my mother died. After I worked through some really dark trauma I hadn't looked at before, my voice came back.

The only compliment I ever remember my mother giving me was about my singing, when she caught me singing and carrying a Celine Dion song in my late teens.

And as I was singing that Excavation Day, I noticed my voice had returned, clear and clean. Earlier I had coughed a little, unusual to me then.

I evidently cleared a blockage.

It's not that I couldn't sing in all my adult life, but the quality improved noticeably on that day and I've been singing literally all day every day since in pure joy and delight.

Until this morning. I can feel a tangible blockage in my throat. I cannot sing, or rather, my singing is back to what it was before this clearing happened.

Then Turn Off the Night came back on, and I started singing in my new voice.

I marveled at this and kept playing it on repeat, hearing my clear, clean voice going strong over and over again, feeling into it, wondering what it was about this song.

Then the girl spoke up.

The girl whose heart was broken in the midst of her grief. The one who never got to sit on the floor sobbing out the pain to a song that tore her open so she could feel it.

That's who was singing this song.

I sang it a couple more times, singing to and with my little girl, singing to the past that never got a good sending off, and toward the end of the final play, my voice broke again, complete.

The girl needed to grieve.

Now in place of ache, I feel warmth in my heart.

What we don't look at will make itself eventually known, whether we want to look or not.

walks off with a pickaxe to continue the archaeological dig