The complete sincerity of the desperate cry. Urgency can’t ask please, can’t say excuse me, or might I, can’t make every sentence rise up at the end, which is a social bowing down. It’s time to be loud. Believe me. There are things besides beauty you can create. A distraction while the others make their escape, for one. A noon-time seance when newspaper astrology isn’t enough and answers have to be found.
My mother and I had a signal, a secret whistle when I was young. I almost hear the sound of it as my name. I have no whistle for my children. When Leo was lost in the dunes at Bodega, all I could do was take a deep breath and send his name up sand-cliffs, through grasses, going head to head with the crashing ocean, my voice like a foghorn that would never stop blasting its sound.
If you can’t find your vision, or your audience, or the time to do what you were put on this earth with the ability and desire to do, caterwaul. Screech, boom, bang. Search at the top of your lungs. In the still aftermath, when you take a breath and the competing sounds come in, to which you listen, ears spread, for an answer, small noises will rise symphonic around you, and the pressing and partial nature of silence, and something else: the echo of your voice, dancing out into the world and coming back. Transformed into a song.