When I Say I Can't Sing
by Sam Edmonds
I don’t mean I can’t listen. Spring is so loud: birdcalls through windows, buzz of bees and lawnmowers, children bouncing basketballs to a rhythm they feel in their bodies. All month I have tried to write about music—when voices lift together in song, or belt karaoke badly, or when you hum in the car. It’s spring, and I am in love, and somewhere out there in the birdcalls and the lawnmowers there is a song I want to give to you.
But the truth is, I never feel more alone than I do when I think about music. I’ve witnessed what it can do, sure, in a stadium where every arm rises, and several hundred voices croon the lyrics to the same song and for those three minutes hundreds of strangers don’t feel like strangers—that is holy. But it’s lonely, too,
when you feel on the outside of it, the only one who doesn’t know the key changes, who can’t hear the notes or clap in rhythm. I thought in writing about music I might try to make this disconnect funny, how my parents paid for weekly guitar lessons when I was fifteen but stopped when they realized I was spending the hour feeding treats to the instructor’s dog and telling his wife about school—or maybe I could talk about how I was the only kid in the church choir allowed to quit because I couldn’t even keep a beat with a tambourine.
Once upon a time there was a girl, and when she was very little, she misheard the word headstrong for head-song. You are so head-song, her parents told her, because she was distracted in choir practice, talking over the music, coming in late on the second verses. They threw up their hands. So very head-song, they said again, and then, Why don’t you ever listen? Go to your room and don’t come out until you can listen.
So she went to her room, opened her window, and told herself she would listen. She would hear the birdcalls and bees buzzing and she would learn something, then, about being a good daughter—
And, dearest, it comes to this: I want to make noise and name it music. I want to hear your voice and know how to respond in tune and follow the sound all the way home—
The once-upon-a-time girl couldn’t hear anything, no matter how she tried. She understood words; she even occasionally understood image and shape. She didn’t understand music, especially without lyrics. My head-song is too loud, she thought. I’ll never be able to hear what they want me to hear.
For a long time, she pretended. But dearest, I don’t want to pretend with you,
even if not pretending means I can’t sing along in the car, means when you gather around a campfire with your guitar and your friends I might be out of place, means I won’t always have the notes to share the song in my head with you.
My music teacher recently told me anyone can learn to sing. She showed me how she taps the beat on her chest with two fingers whenever she learns a new song. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, she said. All you have to do is start keeping time, she said, and I laughed in her face, then, an ugly guttural sound that was a little too loud, a little too rude, because how do I tell her that I have never been able to keep time, not ever,
I am always losing track until I am late everywhere, because time slips through my fingers the way melody escapes my ears. It’s like a waltz, she’d said, meaninglessly, because when I try to waltz with you in our living room I can only ever step on your toes.
In her bedroom, the once-upon-a-time girl taps against the window and then against her throat and it feels like someone else’s hands. When she moves her body to music she doesn’t know where to put her arms. She has learned all the words to the gospel songs her mother taught her, and they are in her somewhere even now, but louder than that is the head-song, that thing in her own mind that prevents her from hearing whatever it is she’s meant to hear when she goes to church.
Listen, you have to listen, her mother begs her and keep time, you just need to keep time, my music teacher tells me, and
so I hold on to time until I am a wide-open chasm of need. I believe in something like music that is bigger than bodies and even if I never get it right, I will still believe—
I do not have a song to tell you how remarkable it is to love you. How scary. I’m a child in her bedroom, head out an open window, talking over the song in her own head just long enough to take your hand and ask: Do you hear the birds?
But the truth is, I never feel more alone than I do when I think about music. I’ve witnessed what it can do, sure, in a stadium where every arm rises, and several hundred voices croon the lyrics to the same song and for those three minutes hundreds of strangers don’t feel like strangers—that is holy. But it’s lonely, too,
when you feel on the outside of it, the only one who doesn’t know the key changes, who can’t hear the notes or clap in rhythm. I thought in writing about music I might try to make this disconnect funny, how my parents paid for weekly guitar lessons when I was fifteen but stopped when they realized I was spending the hour feeding treats to the instructor’s dog and telling his wife about school—or maybe I could talk about how I was the only kid in the church choir allowed to quit because I couldn’t even keep a beat with a tambourine.
Once upon a time there was a girl, and when she was very little, she misheard the word headstrong for head-song. You are so head-song, her parents told her, because she was distracted in choir practice, talking over the music, coming in late on the second verses. They threw up their hands. So very head-song, they said again, and then, Why don’t you ever listen? Go to your room and don’t come out until you can listen.
So she went to her room, opened her window, and told herself she would listen. She would hear the birdcalls and bees buzzing and she would learn something, then, about being a good daughter—
And, dearest, it comes to this: I want to make noise and name it music. I want to hear your voice and know how to respond in tune and follow the sound all the way home—
The once-upon-a-time girl couldn’t hear anything, no matter how she tried. She understood words; she even occasionally understood image and shape. She didn’t understand music, especially without lyrics. My head-song is too loud, she thought. I’ll never be able to hear what they want me to hear.
For a long time, she pretended. But dearest, I don’t want to pretend with you,
even if not pretending means I can’t sing along in the car, means when you gather around a campfire with your guitar and your friends I might be out of place, means I won’t always have the notes to share the song in my head with you.
My music teacher recently told me anyone can learn to sing. She showed me how she taps the beat on her chest with two fingers whenever she learns a new song. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, she said. All you have to do is start keeping time, she said, and I laughed in her face, then, an ugly guttural sound that was a little too loud, a little too rude, because how do I tell her that I have never been able to keep time, not ever,
I am always losing track until I am late everywhere, because time slips through my fingers the way melody escapes my ears. It’s like a waltz, she’d said, meaninglessly, because when I try to waltz with you in our living room I can only ever step on your toes.
In her bedroom, the once-upon-a-time girl taps against the window and then against her throat and it feels like someone else’s hands. When she moves her body to music she doesn’t know where to put her arms. She has learned all the words to the gospel songs her mother taught her, and they are in her somewhere even now, but louder than that is the head-song, that thing in her own mind that prevents her from hearing whatever it is she’s meant to hear when she goes to church.
Listen, you have to listen, her mother begs her and keep time, you just need to keep time, my music teacher tells me, and
so I hold on to time until I am a wide-open chasm of need. I believe in something like music that is bigger than bodies and even if I never get it right, I will still believe—
I do not have a song to tell you how remarkable it is to love you. How scary. I’m a child in her bedroom, head out an open window, talking over the song in her own head just long enough to take your hand and ask: Do you hear the birds?
Dr. Samantha Edmonds is the author of the forthcoming story collection A Preponderance of Starry Beings (Triquarterly Books, 2025) and the chapbook The Space Poet (Split/Lip Press, 2020). Her work appears in The New York Times, Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, The Rumpus, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Rome, Georgia, where she is an assistant professor in the creative writing program at Berry College. Visit her online at www.samanthaedmonds.com