Sapphire and nylon

It's coming up forty five years since me and my guitar first got together. I looked it up - if it were a person I could have said it was our sapphire anniversary! I give thanks that my mum who bought it got that choice right...and yes, she'd have hated my grammar!

Not being able to play it any more has been a grief I've not dared to fully express even to myself. It made up for not having a mum who made good kind choices, or anyone to celebrate anniversaries with, for not having places to be I felt safe in or people who cared how I felt, for all the loss and struggle and loneliness and pain...

I was never a performer - it was a private pleasure to put notes together, and maybe words, to express and deal with emotions, a therapy that created composure from composition...|I would hold my guitar and tunes would come out, and sometimes they'd turn into songs and I liked to play and sing them just for me, and they made me feel a bit more mended. But then for the part of my life when all of the above got way more intense and I became way more broken, that intense comfort was taken away - I couldn't get my arms and hands to do the right things any more.

I'd tear up if I tried to explain what it meant to have that...and lose that...and I'd learnt to try not to (explain or play) but a series of events set the longing off again, the kind of events that really needed the process more than ever...and last week, in desperation, I took my guitar down from the wall one more time and I found that if I tried really really hard I could play a little tiny bit, and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry or swear or sing...so I did all of them all at once!

It seems the well trodden neural pathways are still intact, so that I know where to put my fingers to hold down or pick the strings to produce the sounds I want, but different stroke damage on both sides mean actually actioning the brain's requests is physically very demanding. I can only do it for a few minutes a day (and they have to be minutes when there are no neighbours around to overhear of course) but every few minutes it gets a little easier...well, at the time it does... it still hurts a lot afterwards, and not just in the joints and tendons you might expect but also around my heart where the chest muscles strain ...and yes, that is indeed ironic! And yes tunes and words still appear, and yes it still makes me weep that I can't do it as much as I'd like to...but yes, it still makes me feel a little bit mended again.

This blog post has been a bit of a cheat - written in advance to upload early on a busy day, and not your usual five point plan of things for which I'm grateful, but there are more than a few in there. And maybe a portent too...I strive so hard not to want what I have not got, but there is some stuff I cannot get my being round how to be without, and maybe, maybe one day the time will be right for the rest of it to be in my life as well.