when they tell you the body is the instrument

The body:
The singer’s instrument

The body:
Recent Covid prison, achy, wracked with coughs

The body:
What I thought I was escaping by spending so many teenage hours making music, slipping into a plane of sound that was higher or more worthy (I thought) than my own solidity, despite the burgundy polyester choir dresses that showed everything we wanted to hide, despite the obvious inescapable physicality of creating sound from diaphragm and lungs and glottis

The body:
Ticklish

The body:
The instrument—rooted/alive when my sound seems to emerge from under my feet, unearthly/tensile when it seems to wrap around me from behind or above

The body:
The instrument—porous, sloshy, host of countless bacteria, mucous-filled, acutely trained

The body:
The instrument—piled high with judgments from critics/colleagues: pure, supple, shrill, radiant, not quite what I had in mind, heaven, sex, too big, too small, sounding a little tired today, born to sing this repertoire, should never have sung this repertoire

The body:
Safe, not shot or bombed or raped or denied medical care, not making a grueling journey as a refugee, the mind uncomfortable with the body’s comfort

The body:
Map of love, opportunism, respect, disrespect, pride, shame

The body:
Infinitely expressive in movement and stillness whether I want it to be or not

The body:
Persistent snag as I look back over performance photos, the “flaws” as familiar to my eyes as the backs of my teeth are to my tongue

The body:
Hungry

The body:
Infinite source of material to an artistic gaze, including sometimes my own

The body:
Cocktail of hormones of delight and envy and repulsion and attraction and admiration of other bodies—the body of the friend hugging me, the individual and collective body/ies of performers in rehearsal, the body I shrink from in the train, the healing-brush-clone-stamp-smudge-blur-burn underwear-ad body, the body of the man in Ukraine standing in front of a Russian tank, the socialized-medicine body of a Dutch politician explaining on TV about the necessity of arts closures as a corona containment measure, the athletic exfoliated stylishly-gowned Instagram body of a singer whose jobs I covet

The body:
Tired

The body:
Eyes that instantly overflow (like my mother’s eyes), cheeks that stay red a long time (like my father’s cheeks), hands that are deft at many things (like most of my family’s hands), fingertips always scarred from a picking habit I’ve never been able to shake, a lower back that seems to feel as much as the rest of the body put together—the good, the bad, anything in between

The body:
Sensitive to minute shifts in temperature, pheromones, pitch, timbre, gaze, or gesture, bending or slowing or quickening or spinning or deepening to match someone else’s shifts

The body:
Easy coloratura/difficult legato in one decade, easy legato/difficult coloratura in another

The body:
Container of all the heartbreak, new shards every year, old shards worn a little but never entirely smooth

The body:
The only one I will ever have

The body:
Curious

The body:
Covered in unfamiliar pink stress hives in summer 2020, when everyone else was learning slowness and I was frantically trying to meet a PR deadline for an album that was suddenly and improbably everything

The body:
Inconsistent in self-soothing, craving variously touch, space, pain, pleasure, raised heart rate, lowered heart rate, sun, water, food, solitude, repetitive motion, stillness, darkness, warmth, immersion, oblivion

The body:
Still giving a faint red positive test-line ten days after a low, rocklike pain in my throat and the escalating Covid outbreak in my opera cast sent me into paroxysms of fear

The body:
Still here