Erase Me

VII

We were sitting around the fire on the old rusty benches that night. Charlie had my notebook and was looking over the song I had written earlier today after hearing Devi’s story. His brow creased as he attempted to decipher the meaning of the lyrics and when he did, he looked up at me with a weird and slightly disturbed expression on his face. I shrugged and started playing my guitar. The notes were a lot harsher than they were the other day, louder and brimming over with abhorrence.

I didn’t even bother explaining what the song was about. I wanted to know how they would react to it:

 He took her hand in need.

She pulled away.

She punished him with her lies.

She said they will get along.

He knew she lied

She said she will compromise.

He knew she lied.

 The last lyrics were what really bothered everyone in the room:

 Wouldn’t it be better if the weak mother left?

The son would handle himself better.

The son would sing a sweeter song.

The son could share his food with his friends,

The food she took.

I kept my head down as I drew my fingers across the strings in one final violent chord. Then I looked up to see the shock in everyone’s faces and what looked to be shame in Charlie’s for having created the beat for such a defiant song.

“All the sudden you want change?” one of the guys in the corner asked.

I glanced at Devi and saw the apprehension in her face. I heeded the warning in her eyes. “I just meant it as a joke,” I said with a laugh.

After, Charlie walked me home. He lived near me, just a couple of blocks over.

“Why did you really write that song?” he asked after a long silence filled with only the fizzy echo of our feet against the dirt road.

I wanted to maintain the lie that it was a joke but I just did not have it in me to lie to him. I wanted him, out of everyone else in the world, to know the truth.

“Someday, I want to be a world-famous singer. I want to be a household name. I want people to hear my voice and the second they hear it they know that that’s me singing.”

He hesitated. “I wish I could tell you different but that will never happen. No one has ever had music and they don’t know what they’re missing out on. They won’t fight for something they don’t care about. We are never going to change and you are never—” He broke off, not wanting to hurt my feelings more than he already had.

I am never going to live out my dream, I finished for him in my thoughts. I gave up my dream when I saw my great-grandmother burning the newspaper articles of her. I always had my doubts but at that moment, I knew it was hopeless. And I felt like a fool for letting it take that long to figure it out that I was going to end up just like Carol Sangster: a nonentity who pretended not to regret what happened. She was angry at the world and she had to bottle it all up.

I just wanted to sing once—just once—in front of a huge crowd and they could kill me for it but I didn’t care. I just wanted people to hear my voice.

We reached the end of the road and turned onto my street. I noticed we were walking closer and closer to each other until our hands brushed. We looked down at our fingers then up at each other simultaneously, staring into each other’s eyes.

Then he stopped and turned to face me. I faced him too. My eyes came up to his chin but I raised my head to look at him and his mouth crushed against mine.

Time stopped. I felt his arms around me and I wound mine around him. My eyes were closed and yet all I saw was a beautiful shimmering light—like I was so happy that I died then and there.

He let me go after all of those beautiful moments. Finally it happened. We were together. I put my hand in his with an easy comfort that felt better than I had ever imagined.

We starting sauntering back to my house, more confidently, more slowly to savor these moments, closer to each other, our hands laced together.

Eventually though, we arrived at my house. I saw light flooding from all of the windows.

“Usually my great-grandmother is asleep by now. I don’t get why the lights are still on.”

I stood there, thinking. I was so puzzle that I didn’t notice it when my grip on Charlie’s hand slackened. Then I knew that the worse had happened and I broke out into a sprint towards the house, Charlie at my heels.

I dodged through all of the furniture and into her room. She was in bed, weighed down by weakness as death’s cold and clammy hand massaged her temples. She writhed in pain with small, forced movements.

Carol Sangster was dying.

I knelt beside the bed. Charlie was standing in the doorway, listening in as the old woman spoke.

Her voice was hoarse and weak. “Ever since you were eight, I knew you had a beautiful voice,” she admitted. “I only wish I could sing like you, Aria. I wish I could see you use your gift to its full potential.”

“Music,” she continued. “I heard it, I remember it, and I miss it. I have missed it all these years. I wasted my talent. I was denied my gift all my life and I never complained when I should have stood on a mountaintop and screamed at the top of my lungs.” She nodded. “That’s what I should have done. I should have let go of all the anger and all the music left in me.”

I held onto her hand. She barely noticed that I was sobbing.

“Aria, sweetheart . . . will you sing me to sleep? I just want to hear your voice.”

I looked up at her as the scalding tears streamed down my cheeks. I cleared my throat and I sang the song I wrote for Charlie. I sang the chorus over and over again . . .

 Flaming the fires in my heart,

Singing the songs on my mind,

You wave my worry away,

Like wind helping a bird fly.

I kept singing it over and over and over again until she learned the words and she tried to sing with me. Her withered lips curled into a smile. I had never seen that kind of smile on her before—just in the articles that she burned. She only wore that smile whenever she hit the right notes.

 When I stopped hearing her trying to sing along, I knew she was gone. I fell back and sat there on my hands and knees, bawling. I felt Charlie behind me trying to comfort me but nothing he could do would ease the pain. The burden of the rocks on Carol Sangster’s hunched shoulders melted into lava and seeped down onto the ground where I cried.