I look up in time to catch rivulets of clear wax roll off the taper candle’s summit and, like lava, thicken and harden as they slow and dry on the mountain below. The wax shapes are sultry dancers, tall snail-ferrets. They shift half like clouds do: My imagination dances around their still possibilities.

I unfurl.

I used to watch TV in my living room and think I was all there was…I and Zoom, and Mr. Rogers, and Electric Company, and my mom, dad, brother, the school, the street out front, my friends and their houses, Little House on the Prairie (the past), Buck Rogers (the future), and something about an oil crisis and also a hostage crisis. Some adults drank cool aid and died. Weird things stood out for me: A Time Magazine cover with a skeleton hang gliding. The dentist office waiting room with butcher block couches and chairs covered in brown embroidered with orange, green, and yellow. Roller skating on pavement and how it felt to turn around, like someone held me by the hips and pulled outward. I remember riding in the car back from the pool eating ice cream with my friend’s fractured, thin mother. She used to have pictures of herself taken naked and compare them against herself naked before. And there were always hangnails, painful from biting. Dark sweet cherries in a bowl from our neighbor’s tree. And the sky with changing clouds. I lay under a tree in our front yard and watched them mutate through shapes barely held.

Now, everything shifts. Our 30th high school reunion is the same day as my wedding to Christopher. I knew this when I allowed us to choose this date. In my mind, I can always be with all the people I love at once. I think in this one way I channel heaven and am always so confused that real people like me have time limitations, space limitations, limits at all.

What if it weren’t so? I can soar in my imagination and reality transforms into whatever I want it to. It’s a power so great it’s caused madness among other things.

Christopher and I argued yesterday because he wanted me to use the word “objective” for describing both reality and pitch. His point was for me to use real-world tools whenever possible to test my pitch, since sometimes I’m spot on with the world and sometimes I’m off in my own planet in both reality AND pitch. And, before I open my mouth, I can’t always tell the difference.

The fury rose within me because he refused to find another word than objectivity to discuss it. That word reminds me of before I learned to trust my body and heart, when I tried to control everything with my brain and logic. Among other things, that led to my trying every morning to run, cursing my own weakness, for months after I had developed type 1 diabetes and didn’t realize it.

I also don’t believe in objectivity. We’re so interconnected that atoms behave differently when they are watched. Plus, each animal has thousands of ways to sense the world, yet each are different. Add to this our human subjectivity and it’s like we each look at the ocean and each see something different. Almost all are “objectively” there. And for those who have true madness, who see something NOT in the ocean? Well who is to say they don’t see some other part of this universe? There is an African tribe that believes that if we can imagine something, it exists somewhere.

Scientists, in trying to isolate elements to test them, lose their wholeness. The results, too, are fractional. That’s probably why math is one of the few measures that we can truly trust. It’s vast enough to encapsulate this entire place…up to where the rules break down because there aren’t rules or the rules change. It’s okay. Music is math. Pitch is a real thing, not imagined, and so yes, I shall cleave to the measure of vibration and aim to match as perfectly as I can the heavenly sounds of music, with math. I believe in both, and in a perfect creator, and I long to come home from the cold, hard illusion of the self as separate anyway.

I will merge with everything. It’s all I’ve wanted, though I’ve fractured and hidden myself from the great beacon that wants to unify, the magnet that would pull all the shards of me back into a pool of light.

And I may wind up being able to sing on key more of the time.

Maybe pitch, like math, can be my salvation. Unlike whittling all of existence into well-formed sentences (an impossible task, surely!) maybe I can risk it all to hit just the right note.

And in doing so, I’ll vibrate with all life in unspeakable song.