Last Resort: Sing Until I'm Hoarse

"I'm singing now because my tear ducts are too tired
and my brain is disconnected but my heart is wired"

Driving home tonight there was nothing else I could do. I cried, I sang, I cried then sang until my throat was raw and I was so hoarse that I actually scared myself -- and it felt good.

Singing woke me up to the fact -- doesn't pop music always reveal the most interesting truths to us? -- that I can't even fathom my capacity for love.

Here's the truth: not that everything happens for a reason -- I really don't think so and I think we use that as a comfort and a crutch (it's a poser) -- but, rather, that people come into our lives very specifically, purposely, and they bring something to us that we need. I don't mean every dot with a pulse and human form we encounter from point A to point B, I mean the select people. The ones who are presented to us offering a gift and it's just up to us to recognize and learn.

I've collected people my whole life. Everywhere I go, like songs that I love and travel with on mixes, cds, and compilations, I find people who speak to me in a way that I don't understand, need to understand, can't understand, or intuitively understand and I bring them with me. I don't run from those connections and I don't try to explain them away -- I embrace them and throw every bit of myself in with no fear of that abyss. And that's where my capacity to love is the most amazing thing I know about myself.

The problem is, I resist the call to let go. I internalize each of the people and intend to carry them forever, even (or especially) at a loss to myself. Loyalty supersedes love for self.

Every almost-regret I've ever had (though I truly have none that stick with me) is in relation to a time that, for an instant, I held something back and didn't tumble over the edge of the rabbit hole of someone else's story to see where mine would go when I floated to the floor. When I was "disloyal" to the call from that person's soul to mine -- when I felt what was right, but rejected it and let reason intervene.

But I know I'm headed in the right direction, because at the lowest point of my entire existence, when I lost the one person who I intended to commit most wholly to, I thought: "This is worth it, I need this; I needed this person to come in, and now I need him to go." To experience loss at that level and know it's for good can't be explained: The moment everything in my life felt like it had imploded into the most unbearable, suffocating hell was the moment I felt the greatest calm. (Don't get me wrong, there have been days and months since then that are filled with such grief and pain that I cannot bear to dwell on the memory of them or stand to live through them when they hit me with the full weight of loss, but, in that first moment, it was okay.)

And, why? Because I collected that person for a reason (for him and for me) and regardless of whether he can never fully realize the potential of what I brought to his life, I can feel every bit of good that he did for mine. Even the negative goods -- the retroactive ways that he showed me so clearly how loyalty is not the same as surrendering my heart in order to save someone else. And with that, like I've felt one thousand times before in the past few months, I am free to honor that connection even though I'm the only one to profit from it.

Last year when my friend was adopting her daughter from China we all shared in the story of the Red Thread -- to me the legend extends beyond those immediate bonds of parent and child or lover and lover -- it means we are soul mates with all those we journey with. Each of us collects our soul mates and carries them with us for reasons we can rarely articulate, but that we truly do know and understand. And when those people go, it's okay.

"it was a brief brilliant miracle dive; that which i looked up to and i clung to for dear life had to burn itself up just to make itself alive"