“No, honey,” her mother had said in a very tired voice. “Those are just lights. Street lights, cars, lights in buildings. Nothing special.”

“Oh,” the girl had said, disappointed, and she’d turned her attention away from the window for the rest of the flight.

On this flight, though, she had been able to see the green and brown of fields and the gray strips that were roads and the tiny-looking buildings, at least for the beginning of it… but as the plane had climbed higher and higher, eventually it had broken through the ceiling of clouds hanging over the city and now when she looked out, clouds were all she could see… a vast and snowy expanse of them.

At least, she thought they were clouds. She was enjoying looking at them, and wasn’t about to ask her mother, just in case they weren’t.

I was in the hospital, for a muscle biopsy. They put a mask over my face and told me to breathe deeply. The air inside was like nothing I’d ever known… heavy and sticky and sickly-sweet. Things got fuzzy right away. Vision, feeling, the sounds of the doctors’ voices…

Not all the sounds did, though. The “beep… beep… beep…” of some monitoring machine cut through the growing brain fog as clear as a searchlight, and it was the last thing I heard before I drifted off.

It wasn’t the last thing I heard before awakening, though.

That was The Song.

The Song was like nothing I’ve ever heard before, like nothing else I’ve heard since. It seemed to grow from the simple rhythmic pulse of the machine, but it was so much more. There were words and notes and colors and shapes seemed to flow naturally out of the music.

I awoke with the pure and certain knowledge of The Song in my heart, but without a single note of it in my ears. I couldn’t remember how it went, though I had the distinct impression that it was something I’d heard before… possibly years before.

I’ve heard it again twice since then. Once when I had another biopsy a year later, and once as an adult when I was put under after dislocating my arm. It’s been the same song each time. I recognize it. I remember recognizing it, though I don’t remember how it goes.

When I was younger, I was so sure that it was a real song… as in, one that existed out there in the world I knew… that I looked for it, listened for it, perked up my ears every time I thought I heard a snatch of something that might have been it.

I was forever disappointed, of course. The Song might be a real song, but it isn’t going to turn up on the radio some day.

This doesn’t mean I’ve given up on finding it one day. On the contrary, I’m sure that I will. Even if I manage to avoid the sorts of circumstances under which I heard it the first three times, I have every hope of hearing it again, perhaps more clearly than before. It is my sure and certain hope.

All things pass. The Song remains the same.

The light from the kitchen illuminated a few feet of bare gray wall on the left side of the stairs. The first two steps were visible, and the two below that faintly so. On the right, there was nothing but darkness. Somewhere in there was the big looming shape of the furnace, which could roar to life with such sudden noise and ferocity that it could be startling anywhere else in the house.

“I have nothing to fear but fear itself,” the child repeated, leaning into the darkness to reach for the switch on the gray wall. Unable to hit it from the relative safety of the kitchen, the child stepped down onto the first step and reached out again to flip it.

The old switch made an audible click. At the bottom of the stares, a bare, clear bulb burst forth with light then went dark with a pop, leaving the child with an afterimage of itself and a jumbled impression of the cluttered basement.

“I have nothing to fear but fear itself,” the child said, with much less certainty.

There was a shelf straight ahead with a great big flashlight on it, three feet from the bottom of the stairs. All the child had to do was grip the handrail and follow it down, then follow the wall to the shelf.

“I have nothing to fear but fear itself,” the child said, moments before taking a big step up and back, closing the door, and backing out of the kitchen.

Fear, it transpired, was scary enough in and of itself.

I told him that I enjoyed moving in the same general vicinity as music. It seemed like the more honest response. Not knowing how to dance is not the the same thing as not liking it, of course… no more than asking someone if they like to dance is the same as asking them if they would like to dance.

None of this directly relates to the dance that we’ve been doing with each other, though it may yet one day all come to bear some magical night when there is music and he is there and I am there and we both feel like moving closer together.

Yes, I like to dance.

Yes, I’d like to dance.

Yes, I’d like this dance.

What a big difference a little difference can make.

On we dance.