life

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And I, I never thought I’d leave behind
My childhood dreams but I don’t mind
I’m where and who I want to be
No change of heart, a change in me

– “A Change in Me”, Susan Egan (Beauty & The Beast on Broadway)

I’ve loved singing for as long as I can remember, and I’ve love musicals ever since I got hold of the soundtrack of West Side Story in my early teens. Musicals combined my love for storytelling and music.

For a while, I tried piano but quite frankly, I got bored with the rigid syllabus and the unspoken race to have my piano grade catch up with my age (I started piano in secondary school when most kids my age are already Grade 3 or 4).

I’ve never officially blogged about starting voice classes in May last year, although my immediate circle of friends know that I am permanently unavailable early Thursday evenings.

There were two of us when we started. I’m the alto. Fariah is the soprano. About two months later, Henrick joined us and we have our tenor. The only voice missing here is the baritone, but between the three of us and our voice instructor’s  ability to improvise, it worked.

We don’t take exams, compete or perform. This is good because we don’t really have to beat a song to death before we temporarily shelve it for another song. We are all working professionals and not interested in additional stress. Voice class is something we all look forward to every week because we get to belt it out and laugh if we don’t quite get it right. It’s very therapeutic, and I guess it doesn’t hurt that we can harmonise.

Since we all love musicals, our files are full of scores from them - Les Miserables, West Side Story, Hairspray, Rent, Phantom of the Opera, and various other Disney animated movie and broadway offshoots. There are popular favourites, a few classics, and some choir standards. Most were easy, but a handful took months to master.

This week, we got our first Italian piece - Con Te Partiro (Time To Say Goodbye). Familiar song. The toughest part here is learning the Italian.

My current solos are “Beauty & The Beast” and “A Change in Me“.

And I love being the alto. I didn’t quite realise that this was what I’ve been doing throughout all my church band days. It’s like slipping into a comfortable old shoe.

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I’m on leave today and spent a greater part of my afternoon scanning letters.

The imbalance is starting to become evident. He’s much better at keeping things in one place. I have quite a lot of his letters missing because of the haphazard storage method of my youth. I just found one in a closet I haven’t opened in years.

Rather than sort and scan, I decided that scanning and sorting by date cuts one step out of the process. I only have a quarter of the original pile left and these are the longer letters of our early to mid teens.

I read a few, and gave it up as well. The letters from the primary school are mostly amusing when you read it 19 years later. My letters from secondary school contain a lot of things I have forgotten and don’t really want to remember. Same reason I have diaries lying around that I used to confess to regularly but don’t want to revisit either.

I used to be pretty open about my life with close friends, and I can be really uncensored in my private journals. But lately, I haven’t talked to my friends and I haven’t talked to me.

The kid in my letters have always been darn certain she’ll become a writer one day. The writer sits here and wonders,”Where to from here?”

She is not writing any long, leisurely letters; the art died a long time ago. She hardly answer emails or write to people who would indulge her in her introspection. She doesn’t write about anything important to her, not even when nobody is looking.

She is a writer with nothing to say, which should make some people happy, because to them, her function is to convey what they are unable to express themselves. The fact that she may have an opinion is not relevant.

But I digress.

I enjoy looking at my old letters. Looking at how my writing changed over the course of 20 years before settling into the style I still use now. I enjoy rediscovering postcards, greeting cards and letters from old friends. I’d toss them out but there is a part of me that strongly believes in remembering who you used to be. I’m not one of those people who throw out old diaries because it’s embarrassing, or delete old blog entries. Just because you don’t see it doesn’t mean it isn’t in a private archive somewhere.

Who am I right now? I’m sure everyone will have their own version of who I am and how I fit into their picture. Just don’t ask me. I have no answer.

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