The Nerve

She packs up the fiddle lovingly, cords tucked together just so. Pauses to talk to her latest fans, smiling and nodding, although I imagine she’d like nothing more than to sit down, kick back with a cold beer. Or maybe a hot tea. She has just spent nearly two hours on her feet, pulsing her soul through her fiddle and boots. She left it all on the stage, red hair flying, arms and bow and cord intertwining like some dangerous snake garden. Her voice is hauntingly sweet, her fiddle moreso.

And now she is tired. But no homestyle bed awaits her. Another night in a faceless motel. Ann Arbor. Cleveland. Pittsburgh. The cities roll by as fast as the dots on the map, as quickly as her bow dances across the fiddle. And I marvel that she is doing what she loves. Night after night, in places she cannot know, she bares her heart to the crowd.

And I wonder what it is she has left behind. What haunts her as the miles roll on? Is there someone to miss? Some business she left unfinished? Or is she at peace? Just a woman and her fiddle with a song that must be played.

I wish I had that nerve. I wish I had the heart to jump in a beat-up green van and drive across the country, to drop everything at home and take my music on the road, to believe in myself enough to quiet the voices of doubt and know that my music had a story that had to be told. Of course, MY music is not music at all. My fiddle my laptop, my fingers dancing over the keys. Nobody wants to hear the cow-dying saxophone playing I engage in. And I don’t yet believe that anybody wants to read what I write either.

But on a night like tonight, when I hear the throbbing beat of her fiddle and see every vein in her arms engaged with her song, I catch a glimpse of her dream in motion. And I want to share my own song with the world.