This week, only this sound would suit. This courtship serenade, at the edge of this field; this decibel level, like that of a jet engine, my daughter, once son, at the barrier, L’Rain’s stage lights on her face, hands in the air, singing, like the cicadas, with her whole body. Whole, finally, and somehow all at once.

These cicadas, cruising through Union Park, born when she, then he, was born, for years have lived underground as soft, white nymphs, through a long helpless infancy. And then, as if by some divine signal, an exoskeleton encased their bodies, in a flash, to accompany them through the brief weeks of maturity as they rose from the underworld, singing.

I know. I am somehow, impossibly, supposed to be writing to you, tonight, about 2022. About that summer, not this one. That season, not this night. But I am still aching from the incomprehensible loss of a friend, in awe of my kid’s bravery, stunned by the sound of these six-legged souls, and overwhelmed altogether by the sudden synchronicity of it all. There is a limit to the precision with which we can see the promise of that moment and the power of this one at the same time.

And so, we’ll stay here. Singing.

Cicadas, despite having no voice, no vocal cords, no lungs; are the loudest male chorus on Earth. They sing, as we sing — with their whole bodies. Silence is, I imagine, an answer for all but us.

This song, our reminder. Neither to remember that season nor to hold for the next. This, the reminder of how short a time we have a body. These wines for taking into our bodies. Whole and wholly. In celebration, of all of the noise we have yet to make.

~Maggie

for GHK and NP with special thanks to W. Heisenberg for the principle, Pitchfork for the accidental interspecies inspiration, and M. Popova for always lending me the words when I can’t find them myself.