It's not that serious

A tiny woman on a tiny stage is singing
Her voice stronger and more powerful than her stature suggests pours out of her and into everyone there
 

Into me
it pushes
pushes
pushes to the surface the disturbing things, the dirty things, the deep dark things that creep in the shadows and silent spaces, things once swept into crevices and corners… forgotten like an elementary school year book collecting dust in an old unopened room.
 

She releases it, this unrealized pain.  She feeds it this denied flame.  She articulates it this ignored longing for a life that is for more. 
 

She absolves sins with the admissions of her own. Each song, each verse, each tone sweeps me away to a tiny island where a tiny woman on a tiny stage casts her voice like a net over my soul.  And pulls it from me like cellophane from a
movie reel unraveling it until it becomes something straight and comprehensible, understandable and forgivable. 

The story of her life,

the story of my life,

the story of the couple at the table in front of me 

I realize how alike we all really are.

She pauses.        She talks about life and she says that she felt that she would feel more like an adult by know but she doesn’t and she doesn’t think she ever will and that’s okay because the best beginning in an open ending, things are never really finished just changing and my being agrees with this woman who is gently undoing us as she herself was undone. 

The last painfully poignant organic chord echoes off into silence she smiles, brilliantly.  It’s a reminder that at the middle of each dark night, at the middle of every dark hallway there is hope for metamorphosis at its end.