The water is wide
Thursday, November 14th 2002, 2215 hours
Location: Morehead Lounge, Graham Memorial
Weather: still cold
I've just gotten back to UNC from Duke, where I was attending a concert by harpist / singer / music-thanatologist Therese Schroeder-Sheker in the Chapel.
She had me from the first notes of the harp, lingering like dew in the air; this grey-haired woman with the voice of a girl, singing achingly beautiful songs of love, of longing, of loss; laments, devotions, chants, hymns, even lullabies, each one corkscrewing its way into my heart. Songs, many of which I recognised, soaring up into the high, high ceiling of the chapel, and finding their way effortlessly, unerringly into the centre of my being. They called up so many memories of the past, of who I was, of who I still am. It's been six years now since I first heard her in a recording on a CD. It's strange how clearly I still remember buying that CD: it was a sunny Saturday afternoon in November (I think), nineteen-ninety-six. I picked it up at the CD-Rama section of Popular Bookstore in Marine Parade, the one that used to be over the NTUC supermarket, opposite the (old) library; I don't think it's there anymore. Jes was there with me. We were both seventeen.
If it hadn't been for that Saturday afternoon all those years ago - the time seems still so close, so close yet so remote - I wouldn't have been there tonight, disarmed by the music, feeling that sudden explosion of memories. The music leapt across the years, as if all the pain and grief and sorrow and solace of the intervening years had been collapsed into a single shining moment, and I was seventeen again, a boy playing strange melodies on a guitar. God, so many memories. Jes will know. Amy will know. They were, after all, the people who shared my life most intimately during those wonderful, motion-blurred, indescribable days.
There is a ship, and it sails the sea,
It's loaded deep as deep can be;
But not as deep as the love I'm in -
I know not how I sink or swim.
The water is wide, I cannot get o'er,
And neither have I wings to fly.
Give me a boat that can carry two,
And both shall row, my love and I.
And both shall row, my love and I.