Music as a Lifeline
What Music Speaks, part two
Was music your escape too? A hatch–neither rusted nor heavy, no struggle or strength needed to achieve egress. This hatch, a beauty-opening. Danced into. An easy sliding until your surface became soaked, the beat synchronizing with yours until there was nothing else. An overt hiding place, taking you in one inch of skin at a time until it wrapped you, completely. When your walls closed in, is that where you went? I know the three of us were a lot — boy, girl, boy — a constant chaos of cruelty. When our screaming felt like your sacrifice, is that when you turned it up, closed the door to the downstairs discord and danced?
You can tell me because I think I know.
There’s a moment after daughters become mothers when their mother falls from the pedestal, wings shatter, glow dims. My moment came when my daughter was six months old and I was a twenty-four-year-old new mom, living a waking nightmare of inadequacy and worry. I heard the crash. Saw the glitter of my mother’s pieces, her shine. Watched as she walked toward me instead of floating; skin tinged sallow, eyes level with mine. After I collected every shard and swallowed them, creating my own, I wrote my mother a two-page letter in part telling her, “I get it now. You were just a girl trying to do her best. Just like me.”
