Finding Middle C

{CHAPTER 1} A late bloomer's guide to impossible, embarrassing dreams

Elsa warmly tapped the middle C on her keyboard and looked at me with expectant eyes, ready for me to sing the pitch.

"This first note, sing."

A crimson blush spread across my chest. I had never sung in front of anyone.

Her piano notes hung in the air like taunts, my throat a throbbing globule of tension and choking pain. I could barely swallow, or breathe — a thickness filled in around me like the nightmarish feeling of being stuck in a dream with no voice, of needing to scream but nothing coming out.

I tried to breathe, my brow tightly furrowed, and imagined the note pulsing out of my mouth. At the back of my skull I could feel tears collaborating, readying themselves to take over and pour out my eyes at any moment.

I looked at Elsa, unable to make a sound, while she patiently tapped on the middle C.

It was going to come out wrong. Off pitch. Disgusting. What if I started singing and Elsa had to break it to me in her Colombian accent: "Listen, this dream you have — of learning to sing? I don't think you should try. You are unfortunately pitch-deaf, tone-deaf, hopeless… which means there is nothing I can do for you."

I considered quitting right then and there. I ran the scene through my mind frantically while the middle C note lingered in the air between us: I apologized profusely while asking her to pack up her keyboard, thanked her, stuffed the cash in her palm and put this whole embarrassing, ridiculous idea behind me like it never happened.

Flight.

Her eyes softened, tracing my face in real time, her finger tapping while my heart raced. I could feel middle C bumping up against my ribs, and then mercifully she began singing the note herself. Her body relaxed, her voice effortless.

Envy is lazy. I was hungry. Ravenous. Watching her sing was like witnessing her suck on the bones of a feast, dropping luscious plump grapes into her mouth, a clinking toast on the big wide golden gilded rim of life — the life I felt I should be having but was starving myself from living.

I wanted that.

"Ah…." Her voice was like a soft rope thrown down into a dark cave, suddenly I had something to hold onto. I grabbed it, closed my eyes, opened my ears, took an inhale, and a cautious, reticent sound slipped past my lips — middle C.

"Yes," she said with a smile — I opened my eyes. I did it?

Confused and still terrified, I couldn't smile back. She moved to the next note up on the scale, asking me to follow.

Shit.

She was bouncing between middle C and the next higher note, bah–bum…. bah–bum… waiting for me. She threw her voice down into the cave once more, it was silky and sweet, so sure of itself. I wanted to cry, my desire like the little razor edges of sedge grasses, cutting me with a thousand unseen slices.

"Ah – ah," she sang, her eyes glistening.

I held my stomach with my stiff fingers interlaced, took a breath, and closed my eyes, listening to her. It was like I was standing on the edge of a double dutch game, waiting for the right moment to jump in.

"Ah – ah," I sang.

"Yes, again"

Every “yes” cast a lightning bolt of charge through my limbs, chased immediately with the leaden dread of having to do it again.

Elsa tapped, and lit the way, round after round, unrelenting.

Slowly, in a groove, my breath tentatively dropped out of the panicked ridge of my high clavicle to just below my heart space, and unexpectedly more notes began to unfurl in a syrupy dream — a staircase appearing in the dark as I timidly climbed, note by note.

Three notes, then four, unfathomably, a fifth step added to the staircase.

I was cycling through them over and over until it started to feel like I was floating in space, the tension slackening, my eyes closed, and my entire headspace reverberating on the sounds.

At some point, Elsa elegantly curtsied her voice from the mix and suddenly it was just me and the piano, a duo. I felt undressed, shakey, wobbly without her — I wanted to bolt my eyes open and resist with the teary pleading of a whimpering child — but I kept them closed and tried to stay in my starry space where the staircase unfolded in front of me.

And then I was tumbling and spiraling through all seven notes of the scale, I didn't know which way was up or down anymore, I was just moving, propelling, intuiting. I was everywhere and nowhere. In the dark, the stars in front of me, the sound shaping time.

Jim, my dog, lay inside her keyboard case under the antique single pane window facing the sun – soaking in the moment with his eyes closed, his paws under his chin, his head resting in the glow of the light.

I was floating in outer space. Becoming someone else.

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At the end of our hour together, I landed back in my body — a heavy, weighty re-entry. I had only allowed myself the soft edges of my eyes to fill with tears once during our lesson, but my body felt like I had been racked with sobs for hours. Depleted, rung out, thrashed, and thrilled.

In those sixty minutes, I finally fed a hunger that had famished me for over two decades — proof that singing wasn't just a fantasy but a doorway to something transformative, something that would reshape everything I thought I knew about who I could become. Voice lessons would remake me in ways I couldn't yet fathom.

But it also put things into a startling, abrasive perspective — my journey would be long.

I was dealing with mental and body signals that were telling me that it was downright life-threatening to sing. Why? I wasn’t quite sure — but I had a hunch that the answer to that question was also why I was being called to sing. It was taking every bit of my life-force energy, concentration and will to just make a simple sound.

My progress might be slow going — we spent an entire hour just opening up my mouth to sing seven simple notes on a scale, a warm up really — how on earth was I to get from here to learning to sing an entire song? Let alone in front of people?

Not to mention I was starting late — I was 33 years old. I felt the hammer clanking in my mind, the loud slanting bang of how dumb and dangerous this idea was. I was too late. I should have started sooner. I was too far behind, I might never catch up. What was I even trying to catch up to? What was this ridiculous plan I had in my imagination? Every question, every objection pierced into the most tender, shameful parts of who I thought I was. Someone reasonable, real, presentable.

But my brother-in-law — a vibrant punk musician and surfer — had died unexpectedly at 40 years old just months earlier, and I felt an urgency pressing down on me from all directions, a force ushering me into the impossible life I wanted to live, whether I liked it or not.

I always wanted to sing. I wanted to write songs. I wanted to perform.

These desires, at the time, felt absolutely illicit to say out loud. I could only muster a private, coiled thing, my voice lessons scheduled in a fingers-crossed-my-roommates-are-not-home sort of way.

I did not announce my embarrassing dreams from the mountaintops. I was meek. Mousy. When it came to the things I really wanted, I was in the habit of mumbling and negotiating against myself before even starting the game, downshifting into half-hearted compromises, tucking my settlements under many unsaid true desires.

What did I do with those half-truths? Oh, I was fast-talking. I could charm you in circles with the distractions and adaptations covering up my true heart’s desire — my entrepreneurial persona a covert glove I could slip on and stay warmly tucked inside.

But a clear, pristine, crystal smooth desire — naked and stark — that was not yet in my repertoire.

I did not understand, yet, that those burning, blazing, confusing desires inside me that made no sense on paper — the ones that ignited shame — those were the elemental ingredients needed to transform my life completely. I didn’t know that once I began acting upon them, undeniable seismic shifts would reconfigure my inner and outer worlds. There would be no going back.

I turned to Elsa as she unplugged her Nord; I worried she would be too bored to work with a student like me — she was obviously incredibly talented and could work with people who had more to offer her creatively.

But she seemed boundlessly cheerful as she rubbed Jim's tummy and attempted to put her keyboard back into its case, Jim wagging his tail eagerly inside the black velvety lining, making the endeavor slow going.

"Next time, I will come with a plan — just for you, Kate." My heart fluttered to hear my name in her mouth.

I wanted to disparage myself, to say something grotesque about how awful my voice was, but I couldn't.

I had, at the very least, taken the first step. I had seen the starry space that unfolded when music and voices combined, something I had ached and pined for in my dreams for decades. I had gotten a taste, however small. Now was not the time to spit the morsel back out.

That night after Elsa left, I curled up with Jimmy Boy on my bed and stroked the softest patch of fur between his eyes, the spot of his head that always made me think of his skull beneath it. His big brown eyes soaked in mine — I savored it, rolled it around in my being.

“Jim, can you believe it? Me — a singer? Spinning across time?”

He licked me on the nose, a sweet sandpapery wallop of joyful approval.

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I'll be sharing more stories from my singing and songwriting journey in the months ahead as a self-published serial here on Substack. Nearly ten years have passed since that first lesson with Elsa, my hope is that my debut EP/Album will be completed to mark that ten year cycle — something that felt unthinkable from that starry space where it all began.

In those ten years, I gave birth to two children, married and divorced, reunited with the love of my life, let go of a business, and said goodbye to my soul-dog, Jim. All of it is found in my songs. The voice I was so afraid to use became the way I made sense of everything.

I was right to follow this instinct, right that it would take time, and right that unbelievable worlds would open to me.

I hope these stories inspire you to follow your own burning, blazing desires — no matter how impossible and embarrassing they seem.

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I’ll Be Seeing You Through The Portal 🌀