It’s strange how a single item can reshape your entire understanding of yourself. I’m not sure where to begin, but I guess the beginning for me was Ophelia. My old acoustic guitar, the one I named after the Shakespearean character when I was a teenager.
For years, she gathered dust in the corner of my bedroom, a silent witness to my life. I hadn’t touched her strings since college, or so I thought. Anyway, I was cleaning out my room last week, driven by some sort of ambiguous need for change, when my fingers brushed over her worn surface.
The moment was ordinary, yet somehow it felt surreal. I picked her up on impulse, intending to move her to another forgotten corner. But as I did, a piece of notepaper fluttered out from inside the sound hole and landed softly on the floor.
The sight of it caught me off guard. I didn’t recognize the handwriting at first, but as I knelt to pick it up, a rush of memories enveloped me. It was my mother’s handwriting, and the note was a short one: ‘Your voice is your heart’s music. Let it echo. Love, Mom.’
My mother had passed away two years ago, and in losing her, I had felt an indescribable silence settle over my life. I didn’t even recall ever seeing this note before, but holding it, something deep within me seemed to unlock.
I remembered that summer when I was sixteen, a time when she and I would sit on the porch, and she would encourage my music. ‘Sing for me, Matt,’ she’d often say, with a warm smile that could melt the gloomiest of days. But after her illness took hold, the music in our house had faded away, along with many other things.
Sitting there with Ophelia cradled in my lap and the note in my hand, everything began to shift inside me. The truth was clear—I had buried my voice along with my grief, locked it away in the echoes of the past. I had moved on with my life, or at least I thought I had, but really, I was only going through the motions.
With trembling fingers, I strummed the strings. The sound was uneven, rusty like an old bike pulled out of a garage after years of neglect, but it was a sound nonetheless. I hesitated, my voice ready yet unsure, like a bird about to take its first flight. Then slowly, quietly, I began to sing.
The notes were shaky, but they filled the room, expanding outward like ripples in water. I sang through tears, and I sang with the memory of her laughter etched in my mind. Ophelia’s echoes surrounded me, weaving the notes with memories, with emotions that were both painful and healing.
In that moment, I understood something fundamental about myself. I realized that my fear of facing my grief had silenced me more than losing my mother ever did. But through her words, her silent encouragement, I found a fragment of my old self. My voice wasn’t lost, just hidden, waiting for this moment to emerge.
That night, I played and sang until dawn, a personal concert for an audience of one, reconnecting with the essence of who I was. The realization that I could still sing, still connect with that passion buried within, was liberating.
I’ve been playing every day since then. Not for anyone else, not yet. Just for me and for her. I’ve found a small, quiet joy in letting my voice be heard again, in allowing the echoes of our shared past to guide me into a future where my heart’s music is free to resonate.
In sharing this, I hope to encourage anyone who’s felt silenced by loss or fear. Our voices, much like our truths, are never truly lost. They just need the right moment to echo.