This morning the Lakeshore whipped past, to my usual accompaniement of last week's singing lesson.
They've been changing, steadily. Getting harder, and all the more satisfying.
I'm getting to a new point. I'm hearing things. I've sprouted an ear. I've grown new hands, that clap along -- sometimes on rythm.
I've always been that one set of hands clapping off-beat, at the end of the show.
Sometimes in class, when Heather stops playing to drill me on rythm, sometimes, I get it. When I don't try too hard. When the wind is blowing in the right direction.
On this particular tape, I can hear her clearly -- telling me that I got the beat down just right.
I hold on to that sentence with white fingers.
The part of "Alma Del Core" where the melody changes and sails above the trills and spills into one long pure sound?
She said I sang that one perfectly.
Me.
My vibrato is appearing almost on cue sometimes, my diaphragm is building strength with the maelstrom.
Some days I can see the burst of sound erupting from my mouth and I wonder where it had time ti coalesce.
I have been drilling myself for eight months now. Repeating coloraturas, trills, portamendos, and general diaphragm games.
Somewhere in that time, I grew an ear, and a voice snuck out of nowhere.
Some days I hear myself and think "I am becoming less terrible".
Twenty six years without singing a note, and suddenly -- I have become so much less terrible.
So far from good, so far from strong, I still sing anything in my second register just a touch too sharp (aching to climb higher), but so far up the wall of the pit I thought I was forever buried in.
Sometimes I take a moment to remember this or that impossible thing.
Sometimes I realize, my list of impossibilities is slowly being checked off.
One by one.