That is where they live,

where they get their breath:

there, in the gap between,

the empty place.

Ursula Le Guin

I do love song. I told this to gar and ci, who knew me better than any, and must have known how much I loved their stories. But I am not sure I like to sing. I feel not good when I try, too large and lurking and solid and slow. When I come to above, and fill myself with the stuff of song, my throat thrills to join the thrum. I don’t know how the stuff works, just that feeling of fullness when I am full of it.  But when I try the sound of return, I find that the stuff has emptied elsewhere in me, or maybe, it leaves me. 

The whimper is what makes me think I do not like to sing. When I go to begin, I hear a whimper, and I know ci heard it too, because she told me so. She said nothing is wrong with me, that she thought she remembers herself whimpering before she returned for the first time. But it has been so many times that I have tried and heard the whimper and then felt as the song loses itself from me like a limp puffer losing all of himself as he lastgasps away towards the bottom, lost, like gar and ci, lifted above as I strayed. Only, instead of infinite sand or invisible net, I disappear back into myself. The dead fall, my family floats, and my song will fade into the deep again.

I hear one song inside of me, like a fable. I always start the same way. I sometimes move without voice for hours afterwards, drifting through the world, imagining a lay who knows how to keep the song going. gar made sure I keep returning above, to try again, and I am grateful, very grateful, thank the stuff that she was nice to me. Sometimes, I almost can hear her return, and I laugh, remembering that she knew all things I do not. Her song was always true, and she yet did not try when returning to song, she let the world take it all back, until those above took her. I loved to wander back into her song, coating my skin in her memories, her gratitude, her sight coursing through my world like thunder. 

I hear the whimper loudly now, and slowly I wander, from and towards her far away song. I know she is still my gar, and I am still her lay, and one day I will be ready to return her myself. I decide again, go above, try again, and in the stuff I feel her, whispering and strumming the whimpering tendon with winds of encouragement, and falling back down, I do not even try. I was sure that our world had more to give. But now my world is quiet, and listening, and quietly I listen too. Maybe that is who I was meant to be, lay who listens but not sings. I wish to tell gar this, held in her great fin. She sang of a world alive, songs for everyone and everyplace. Sooooooon layyy, yooooou will siiing. I don’t think so. She was special. Stretching and yawning and returning everything of the world since the beginning.