Constellation · Becoming

It was close to eleven at night when Shane’s guitar woke me.

The house was dark, except for a light left on in the back room. Shane was sitting in the living room with his guitar, almost entirely in shadow, playing something I had never heard before.

There was almost always music in our house. Shane played every day, often for hours. Sometimes he was working through chords, sometimes playing covers, sometimes returning to one of his own songs that already had a shape.

But when Shane was writing something new, the feeling was different.

There was an energy he exuded that I learned to recognize almost at a cellular level. I knew when he was in his zone, following the same few lines again and again until whatever had found him began to take shape.