Music Becoming Water
It was a tough week for my family. My sister had surgery, and everyday I got in the car and drove, drove toward work or the river, drove and drove, kept looking into the water and beyond it, always beyond it, somewhere further south where she was having her surgery and hoping she would be okay. If I could dive into the water or wheel into the sky. If I could make that jump and live to tell it. In those seconds not a death, not terror, not a slipping and falling, but flight. If I could do that and find her okay. If she would be okay.
All week, I kept a friend’s music with me. She gave me bluegrass violins and mandolins I had not heard. A gift. Always like this when I hear new music I love. It sweeps through me like well water sunken two hundred feet under mud and rock, drilled through and brought back up cold, then down again slipping into the lungs, building a river out of the soul. The water like music like air across the Ohio leaves you thirsty. Drink and drink. Never enough to fill you.
Where is that point where music becomes water becomes air into blood? Your compass stops turning, points you to the river, to your sister, to one concern. Day after day, I waited and slipped from myself into the possibility of flight, hoping she would be okay.
And she is. My father called to tell me. So I walked away from the river and back to my car. I’m still trying to relax. But the music stays on. I can’t turn it off. I don’t know what to do with it now. It pours and pours into my body. Somewhere it must be slipping out of me because there are only so many branches and arteries walled inside this skin. I wonder what the river carries away when it leaves, and where it’s going and will I ever travel far enough to recover the pieces.