I wanted all that ability for myself but floundered it. So I’ll have to settle for crying on your guitar instead of my own.

Girls like me want that kind of determination, but it's fickle that way. Or we are.

One doesn't simply set their mind to it and do it like that, despite what you might say. There’s a lot more to it than that, and we can never find the time.

Yet, we know it’s there–

Somewhere underneath this feeling of hopelessness, there’s a gliding flow of ease to be found … if we could just push past the exhaustion.

You've seen that expression on a person’s face when they’ve found it – when something takes over. The glass veil drops over their eyes, and you know they’re going somewhere else.

For the longest time, I only ever felt it through books. When you’re reading and discover the words have become visions, conjured as you’re reading them and drawing your eyes to take in more. Faster you go… You can’t speak them aloud. Your mouth could never keep up.

Just as when I’m writing, there are moments my fingers cannot. To be in that zone is exhilarating. And I know it’s waiting for me if only I could push through it – the way I’ve learned I am capable of doing in other areas of my life. If only I put my mind to it. If only I decide it’s worth doing…

When that happens, sometimes, amazing things happen.

I've seen it.

I've felt it. That moment when it becomes something you can turn loose and let flow out of you. Your body finds a rhythm and a personality all its own; though, some part of you knows it’s all been done before. And yet, not in you, it hasn’t.

It’s like a bird stretching its wings.

My jaw slackens a bit with the idea of it... I let it. A network of other muscles begin to unlock below my chin as I do. I threaten the release with a grin, so I attempt to control my gratitude and remain somber.

Instinctually, I move to crack my neck, and it does.

Right and left never really wanted to work together in me. It’s a reflection my mind cannot resist in this instant, as I remember a mountain of past experience. I stretch and move to allow the thoughts to come.

Dented and dusty, I'm perched at the top of borrowed band instruments, like a genie whose bottle is somewhere amidst the debris field. Squeaky, tone-deaf harmonies croak from this toad whose partially buried and imbedded into a mountain of legs and limbs and broken things.

The sound is enough to bring me back from that place, where I could go there with you if only you’d help dig me out.

Plop, plop.

The teardrops fall, you see, when the guitar is here with me. When you are not – or cannot, rather – be here with me.

It is what it is.

We accept it, the way it's forced upon us this way. It doesn't make the strings find their way for me, the way I could have seen it in my mind.

So, I'll take up Mazzy. I'll five-string serenade you inside my head instead, and you'll love that even more… inside my head.

"She wanna be admired..." The words tease out of the song the same way I tease myself about my own vanity – about my needs and desires in this life.

Probably not in the way you'd imagine, as I'll always be the runt of the pack inside my mind, I think about that line in The Strokes song a lot.

Certain lines mean more than others, don't they? Some hit you on another level – one you can't explain. They speak to something. You have to ruminate on them a little longer to understand the heart string that’s being pulled.

The Wallflowers breeze in and out of my life with a coolness that carries me off the wall and out into the streets... I’m walking in my black boots in the dark on some city street I do not know. My hands are in my pockets, my back against the cold.

"Feelin' pretty is so hard" croons over my shoulder and into my ear, rattling something inside my core.

Yeah, it is, isn't it? And there are times I ask myself if I ever truly felt pretty at all. Doesn't matter what you think, whoever you are on the outside of me. Because I know you're just one person. One opinion out of far too many – none of which matter in the grand scheme of things. At the remains of the day, what value is there in being pretty to some and not to others?

What value is there in learning some pretty chords?

To make a joyful sound

That’s why it’s taking so long – my lessons. I pick it up and try it out, finding value where I feel value remains.

But then, there’s always something more important. And it feels like such a waste when one’s time could be better spent. What doth it profit? I ask myself and rationalize away the usefulness of learning to play the guitar, especially at my age.

Still though, this morning, I trimmed my fingernails short. I sat on the front porch in the sunshine and wrote these words. Then, I imagined the chords under the pads of my fingers and decided for myself … once again.

To what benefit?

Fewer teardrops perhaps, but also, for the benefit of different kinds of sounds. Pluckier ones…

Ones that may resonate in the echoing way they do when heard from far away mountaintops.

I laugh with humility and it echoes, too.