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When I was in High School I would sit in my room for hours playing guitar and singing. With no sisters or brothers, computer or personal phone line, I was desperate for company. A part of me must have thought if you sang the world was listening.

I don’t know how my grandparents stood it, quite frankly, me scratching away at the strings, mangling chord progressions over and over while I wrenched songs out of my drama and hormones. I imagine at their advanced age it was the better alternative to trying to speak with a teenager.

I played and wrote songs for years, even as an adult. Ty, six weeks-old, barely feathered, quickly knew my singing voice as well as he knew my conversation. He heard me compose a maybe-I-should-break-up-with-you song for my live-in boyfriend. (And then heard me deny that those were my intentions when said boyfriend heard me sing it.) Ty witnessed the break-up too, of course.

Ty then listened when I wrote my I’m-really-kind-of-sad-but-I’m-sure-I’ll-get-over-it song. Our move to Florida involved an I’m-so-homesick song and then an oh-my-God-isn’t-this-place-amazing song. There was of course, a how-dare-you-break-my-heart-you-bastard song somewhere in there as well. I wonder if my songs punctuated time for Ty like his chosen phrases punctuated mine. He did after all, sing.

Ty mostly made up his own words, or rather his own language and often his own melody, but he always sang along. And we kept singing the old songs while I wrote new ones until right around my 30^th birthday when I stopped.

I don’t know why I stopped, honestly. There wasn’t an incident or a decision I made. I just stopped. Maybe I didn’t need it or maybe I let things get in the way. All the same, I have a book of lyrics and two guitars that have moved with Ty and me everywhere we’ve gone. And the other night I pulled the guitar out of the closet.

I’m six months out from a big birthday and lately my past feels like it’s folding into my future. It doesn’t help that the novel I’m writing is tackling some of my deepest fears about who I was, am, will be. I guess I was wanting to find some of the old places and raw feelings in the songs. Or more likely, I was just feeling lonely like that teenager I was, desperate to tell someone exactly how she felt. I wondered if a guitar and a song could still feel like pulling the world to my feet to listen.

I tuned the guitar. I found a few tentative chords. I wracked my brain to remember a song and I sang. It was frustrating. My voice is rusty, my fingers lacking calluses and it hurt to play. It didn’t feel like having a conversation with the world at all. And when I stumbled halfway through, forgetting the lyrics, I halted with a choice curse word. Then I slapped my hand on my mouth, hoping Ty, mimic of all things profane, didn’t hear.

Ty didn’t hear.

Ty was too busy singing. And singing. And singing. And it was bad. Worse than bad, it was horrible. It made me sound good. And it was also deliciously wonderful, especially when we both began to laugh.

I didn’t need the world to listen. I had Ty. I had Ty to remind me as always, that there are things in your life that you can dust off, embrace and they will still make you happy. That you should be happy. And that we should sing.

Catch up on Tuesdays with Ty