Grulk is not wrong. I keep returning to that. He is not wrong about the obligation, not wrong about what the song means, not wrong that she’s someone who takes things seriously. His logic is sound. His love for the situation is genuine. He wants this to go well in the way that Grulk wants things: completely, visibly, without reservation.
The thing he doesn’t know is her history. I’m not sure I could give it to him even if I tried, because the history is hers and she gave it to me at a creek on a Sunday morning when she trusted me with the worst of it, and that trust isn’t mine to redistribute.
I go back to the stage.
I pick up the guitar.
I play the song.
I’m home by midnight. I don’t intend to play again, but the guitar is next to me on the couch, out of its case, available, and I pick it up without deciding to and start from the beginning.
First come the opening bars. The creek and the oaks.
Then the middle section—her grandmother’s hands cleaning up what she threw, the dulcimer coming down from the wall at exactly the right moment. There’s the hill on her property where the oaks throw their shadows east. The turkeys. The way she sat with the StillWater drum as if she’d been listening for it her whole life.
When I get to the gap, I keep playing.
I don’t know why this time is different. I’m not trying harder. I haven’t changed my approach or discovered some new technique. I’m playing the song the way I’ve been playing it for weeks, following it where it goes, and this time when I reach the place where it usually stops, it doesn’t stop.
Then the ending arrives.
Not built toward. Not worked for. Just there, the way the melody arrived that morning in her driveway—fully formed, inevitable, the only thing that could possibly come next. Four bars. Exactly what comes next.
I play it through to the end.
I sit in the quiet of my apartment and let it settle.
The song is finished.
I play it once more, slowly, to make sure it’s still there. It is. Every note, the whole shape of it, from the first bar to the last. It’s done. It’s right. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written.
It couldn’t have been made for anyone else. It came from listening to her, and it’s made of her, not the version of her she shows to people but the version she showed me on a Sunday morning at a creek when she trusted me with the parts she doesn’t show.
I set the guitar down.
The apartment is very quiet. The guitar and the one photograph and the furniture I bought because it was the right size. Eight years and it still looks like someone moved in recently and hasn’t gotten around to the rest of it.
The obligation is present. It’s always present. But sitting here with the finished song, I notice something different about its weight. Or not different, lighter. Not because it’s resolved. It isn’t resolved. I still don’t know how to give the song without the framing poisoning it. I still don’t know how she’ll hear it if she ever hears it.
But the song exists now.
That’s the thing I’ve been circling for months and couldn’t see until this moment: the song finished itself tonight in an empty apartment with no audience and no recipient and no reason except that it was true and it needed to exist. I wasn’t building the gift. I wasn’t answering the obligation. I was following something that had somewhere to go, the way I always follow things that have somewhere to go, because that’s what I do. It’s what I’ve always done.
The obligation didn’t make me listen to her. I listened to her because she was worth listening to, from the first visit, from the moment she handed me back the exit I wasn’t looking for and I said, “No, this is mine,” before I’d finished thinking about why.
That much I know now.
I sit with it carefully, with both hands, not trusting it too fast. But it’s there. Clean and clear and not going anywhere.
The question that’s been circling for months arrives one more time, the same loop it always runs:if there were no obligation, would I still be here?
The answer comes before I finish asking.
Yes.
This time, for the first time, I trust it.
Twenty-three miles away, Honey is in her grandmother’s house, or her workshop, or somewhere on her property, and she doesn’t know any of this. She doesn’t know about the obligation. Shedoesn’t know there’s a song. She doesn’t know that somewhere in the last few months, listening to her became the most important thing I do.
