My transition into owning myself was through the oboe.
Me coming into my own was through voice. After all, the oboe was rented, was it not? It was another thing that tied me to my parents, and I was hitting adolescence when one most acutely feels such things. My voice was my own and literally no one could take that from me.
And it was all luck, or synchronicity, or perhaps some subtle machination I don't yet understand, that got me into choir.
The freshman choir was suffering in numbers, and so I found myself roped in during my sole remaining free period my first year in high school. Roving bands of students were sent through the halls to loop in the hapless enjoying their lunches. Fourth period, they promised, would become our favorite for a much different reason than it had been before. Choir, you see, was a source of joy.
And it was, too. Choral music, I found, coils around you when you're buried in the midst of it in a way that instrumental music never did for me. It was easier to enter into a state wherein I was lost in whatever a flow state is while singing than it ever was while playing an instrument.
I have thoughts, I have thoughts...
But, later.
I was roped into music in a way I had never quite experienced before. I was roped in so completely that large swaths of my studies outside of choir suffered. I could focus on math, or I could focus on choir. I could focus on Latin, or I could focus on choir. I could bring the two together even, could I not? *Horatius villam habet, i-ae-i-ae-o. Et in villam...*
It came so much easier to me than did any other subject, too. I could dive into choir unlike Latin or history or biology. I could dive into it and be completely subsumed. *He would be riding on the subway or writing formulas on the blackboard or having a meal or (as now) sitting and talking to someone across a table, and it would envelop him like a soundless tsunami*, yes? I would be sitting in my chair, folder tucked down alongside it, and I would be holding my music, and my chin would be far, far too high up in the air --- a fact I would not learn until later --- and it would envelop me like a soundless tsunami. It would wash over and through me. I would be hollowed out and reverberating like a pipe.
It was work, I do not mean to minimize that. I would scribble notes in the music, and stammer, and get sick, and never, ever drink enough water. I would have bad days. I would hate my conductors. I would refuse to practice. I would plug my ears. I would blast *Alamaailman Vasarat* rather than listen to choir music. I would curse the alarm waking me up for the before-school sectionals.
I flowed through the years of choir languidly. I flowed from choir to choir. Freshman choir. Sophomore year: the show choir and the madrigal choir. Concert and madrigal the next year. Concert and jazz my senior year. I flowed from one to the next with an effortless ease that maddened at least one of my friends. Maddened more, I'm sure.
Our freshman choir had particularly disgusting outfits, with the tenors and basses wearing white tuxedos --- just the jackets were white mind; still black pants, still a white shirt --- and the sopranos and altos Pepto-bismol pink dresses. There was nothing to be enjoyed about either, and yet there was no small amount of pride that went along with the outfit. Going up those stairs in the room that served as both orchestra and theater practice room, the stairs in the back that led up into some secret attic space, wandering among the stage production outfits there and the countless racks of tuxes and dresses for the choirs. It was a secret space. Hushed. There was a sensation of conducting some illicit deal up there. Head up the stairs, walk past three racks and turn right, whisper your outfit size, collect your package, go home.
I remember showing my outfit to my step dad. I didn't know that he and my mom were more than on the outs with each other, but that they were in the early stages of getting a divorce. But I remember putting on my outfit when I got home and coming into his office to show him and getting an eye-roll and a that's-nice and feeling vaguely let down, like perhaps this thing that I was newly excited about was somehow a bad joke. It was a thing that children did, or that was unbecoming of our station, below our pay grade. I don't even know what he thought.
All I thought was that, yes, this is silly, but here I have discovered something magic, a little secret, a hidden smile he could not see. I could sing and my feet would lift an inch off the ground, my backside an inch off the chair I practiced in.
I went back to my room knowing that him urging me toward karate was me brushing up against this new form of control, but that me finding choir was some form of mastery that he could never attain. And me a beginner!
I took off my outfit and put it up on the hanger in my closet.
I don't know that he ever saw it again. I know he never made it to any of my concerts, of course, but I also don't remember whether or not we were even living with him by the time my first concert rolled around. Maybe?
Either way, it did not last, and by the time singing had taken over, he had ceased to exist in any way meaningful to me. As I flowed into choir, he flowed out of my life and, as far as I can tell, slipped between the atoms of this world and passed from being. It did not matter.
