Humming the tune, I felt the wind rustling through my golden curls as they bounced with my movement. I tapped my fingers against the side of my dress making them swish through the sea of cloth moving freely like a peaceful dream.

The words were coming back now, slowly creeping back into the song I had created today. I heard a creaking noise from the side of the house. A person. I grasped my mouth shut, silencing the music, shutting it inside again, begging it to stay. My songs, my words they were a secret and only the 7 year old hiding in the garden, hands gripped firmly over her mumbling lips, could know about it. My own little musical world that I wouldn't let anyone else reach.

Noises always overwhelmed me as a child. The fire alarm would ring at school, and I would curl up on the floor and cry, frozen in fear. The noise was too pitched, too continous and too invasive. It took away my music; the notes would drown in my head. Choirs and orchestras were a constant part of my school experience. When playing violin, my feet would move beneath me aching to join in. In choir, my smile would beam as I swayed and swung my little arms around my waist letting my fingers ride the airwaves. When I got scared during solos or when my violin wouldn't cooperate with my fingers, I would just close my eyes. This was about the music and me, no one else. I remember my first music exam for violin, my heart throbbed inside of me and my hands froze in pale ghostliness. The examiner asked me to turn around and started playing notes on the piano, as she said "Think of your violin. What would this note be called?" I stared at the pencil marks on the wall. Mindless fingers had strewn their pencil violently into squiggles and lines against a white abyss. She asked me again as a bird flew onto the windowsill above the confining room we were in. I closed my eyes. “Can you play it again please?” I wriggled my ready fingers, my hand hovering above my shaking leg. The notes rang out as I played them into the air, catching them in the cracks of my fingers as they flew past. I hummed the notes above and below until I remembered the rhythms, the letters I was meant to recite.

I left, passing with flying colors. I just remember smiling about the fact that I could think of the letters and use my words to express what I could hear on the outside.

I'm in high school. My words escape me as tears start to lean on my bottom eyelids, dropping dangerously into a tumble, ready to spring out and onto my face at any moment. “I can't explain it, I just can't sing it Ms. Amy." I was practicing for my audition to get into the music program at my college. I had to sing two arias of my choosing. The words weren't difficult; I would play them in my head on a loop as my teachers would drone on about the importance of sentence structure or biology. I knew the notes because I would shiver slightly when my teachers finger would slip onto the wrong key on the piano. Yet sometimes, I still have that tendency to lock the music inside. Music became so personal to me that sometimes letting it go seemed as if I was revealing too much, too many emotions and connections that were intertwined with my identity, my story. I finally closed my eyes and out it came, I sang it all with my eyes closed my fingers losing themselves in the air. My teacher looked at me and smiled. “Leah, I want you to sing like that every time.”

Then the email came. I had waited months and months. I had told my friends what I was going to college to do, to take a leap, to be vulnerable and use the music that wanted to stay locked safely inside of my head. I read it over and over, but the sentence made it clear that I wasn't what they wanted, that my music skills were just not enough. I shrugged it off like I do in the face of turmoil and hid away the pain. Angrily wiping the tears that wouldn't stop catapulting themselves down my face, screaming for release with no patience for rebuke. I went to school late that day and managed to arrive in time for my weightlifting class. I violently threw my weight ball against the wall in the third round of crossfire, rapidly trying to forget the audition song that was still reeling in my head, the doubts over how many mistakes I must have made, how ridiculous I must have sounded. The ball came back with twice as much force as I had expected and knocked straight into my unexacting nose. Blood fell into my hands and onto the floor, and so did my dreams.

I got over the rejection. Life moves on and so did I, yet the music wouldn't play, my lips wouldn't open when I heard a tune begin to form inside my head. I wouldn't let it come out, it wasn't good enough any longer. At college I would take as many courses as I could in the music center. I considered endless minors in music, dance, theater, violin, but nothing would suffice the hole that was still there. My new music tutor would watch me tap my fingers on the piano, would let me turn around and face the train tracks as the train whirred by before I did my warm ups so I didn't have to look at him when the notes reluctantly tumbled out. Then one day I spilled out the emotions and the frustration that I felt surrounding my rejection. He consoled me and listened, nodding like only a wisened man of his age can. “Yet you are more than that rejection, Leah,” he said. "The music department would ruin you, would ruin your sound, would make you so technical that it wouldn't be you. You would just be another classically trained music teacher looking for a job."

That's when he told me about Nashville and that's when I began to fight for the music inside of me again.