the song

 

There’s no glamour in long days of petty tasks, nor in dark nights alone between cold sheets when it hurts to think and to remember, and you have to work hard to come to grips with the fact that there’s no Mom and Dad’s room to run to when it feels like the black might swallow you up. You heave your sobs silently, though you know well that there is no one there to hear them—as if afraid to break the sacred silence of an empty house. Others sang and danced, but the King asked you only for a whispered, melancholy tune so quiet in the din that only He could hear it, and you wish that that could be enough. Perhaps it was not your inability that kept Him from giving you the grandest solo, but your very need to be heard; perhaps He knew that before He could entrust to you a greater part, He must first address your doubts that a line of music so feeble could ever have a place in a song so great.