Friday, September 2, 2011

Friday night

It's Friday night. The refrigerator is humming softly from the kitchen. The sound is a comfort to me. Like white noise, I guess, only without the windy vortex those white noise machines make. Oh, the humming just stopped. Oh. There is still sound. Of course. I live in a city. The suburbs actually. Westwood, three blocks from Westwood Village. Usually I hear crickets singing in the bushes and plants that line the outside of my apartment building. But not tonight. Tonight the crickets must be sleeping or chirping outside somebody else's home. I hear the thrum of the occasional car passing by. The creak of footsteps in the apartment above mine. Focusing on the sounds is sweet right now.
My apartment is in an alcove apart from the main hallway. I like it because it is quiet, peaceful. I have a new neighbor whose comings and goings have blended in to the quiet. I wonder if my manager arranged that. Advertised my little corner of the building as quiet. I'm not always quiet anymore. I'm taking voice lessons and come 10 a.m., I am practicing, singing many of the warmup and training exercises my voice teacher, Mitch, taught me and then moving on to the songs I am working on.
This morning I practiced for an hour and a half. The exercises and then the songs. Oddly enough one of the songs I just started working on is "My Favorite Things" from "The Sound of Music". I say "oddly" because it was a favorite song when I was a young girl, but after I was raped in October, 1990, I couldn't bear to listen to it, much less sing it. Music from the past had become a threat. A threat that when present, conjured up the bad memories, memories from childhood and adolescence, and memories of the rape. Over and over again they'd flash across my eyes and through my body, bringing to the present the childhood and adolescent traumas, the silence when I needed sound, the yelling when I needed silence. The self-disgust and the shame after the minister, the one who raped me, had finished. The terror that he would come back and rape me again. And on and on the flashbacks and fears rolled through me. P.T.S.D. Twenty years worth because of that asshole who claimed to be a man of God.
God, with whom I lost all connection because of the horrific acts of one man.
The refrigerator is humming again. I am healing. I know I am because of the singing. Because I can once again sing, "My Favorite Things" and enjoy the sound of my voice, and the vibration in my body and the feel of the words as they touch my lips. The memories will never go away. But they are quieter now. Weaker. I can sing "My Favorite Things" and not fall back into that state of terror.
My eyes are starting to get heavy. The refrigerator hum has paused for the moment. Time for bed.