the singer

10

Yesterday afternoon, while sitting in my make-shift home office, I heard someone singing through the open balcony door. My balcony faces a patch of pine, aspen and ash trees, and when I peeked out through the window I saw a girl walking around down there. She can’t have been older than thirteen, that awkward age when you’re still a child but can’t wait to grow up. And she was singing Alicia Keys’ “Girl on fire” with a passion I’ve rarely heard from anyone but professional singers. Singing that forcefully while maintaining such a confident pitch requires really good technique. I would know. I also sing for trees. Beautiful vistas, wild waters and light through spring leaves call it out of me. It is like a hidden, precious space is opened up in me and the only way I can keep myself together is through song. But never as well as this girl. Singing: “She’s living in a world, and it’s on fire; Feeling the catastrophe, but she knows she can fly away /…/ This girl is on fire”. Me, speechless.

Photo: Pine tree in Bergius Botanic Garden, Stockholm, Sweden, August 2018. Posted on Instagram April 17, 2020.