Without End (Song)

I never thought I could sing well until I really tried.  I had sung before, in that little church building I can barely remember now, over two hundred years ago, in that tiny frontier town where I was born and where all of my family died, so long ago.

After what happened to me, I didn't think I had much more to sing about.

But as decades go on, life gets quiet without a song, without music of some kind.  When the radio was first invented, it enchanted me, all the voices I could hear and the things they had to share.  And then vinyl records became available, a way to play and replace the music I found I liked to hear but still didn't feel up for singing.

There had been financial crises and wars and death all around me, but I lived on.  I saw people I dared to love pass on, but I lived on.  I lost anything even close to dear to me, but I lived on.  What reason did I have to sing?

Yet somehow, music still found its way into my life.

It had never been a big part of my life before, centuries before, when I was still young and thought I would live a normal life.  But no one can live without music of some kind.  No one can truly live without a song.

As more decades passed, I saw the songs in others, I could hear them.  It wasn't just the musicians.  It was the teenage girl in her car, probably having just gotten her license a few months before, a sparkle in her eye as she shouted out lyrics I couldn't hear through the glass window.  It was the parent with their child in the backseat, singing nursery rhymes to the little tot who would one day grow up to be that teenage girl.  It was the college student with his friends, who didn't care about blasting their radio with the windows rolled down so that everyone around could hear.  I saw some people scowl, but I found I like it.  My life was... strange to say the least.  I could remember back to when if I wanted music, I had to make it myself.  Now, music was all around, accessible, pervasive.  Everyone had their own song.

And I decided it was time I try to find mine.

I was two-hundred and twenty-nine years old when I decided to start trying to sing again.  And it became one of the little ways I could at least try, despite all the war and famine and loss and death, to make the world around me just a slightly better place.