When the Song Finally Came Back

A Bird Uncaged

Writing my first song after losing my best friend felt like stepping into a room I had locked from the inside.

Music had always been my language. Long before I had the words for grief or trauma or contradiction, I could play instruments, and eventually I could sing. I could pour pain into melody and come out the other side breathing. But when Vic died, the music went quiet. Not because I didn’t feel anything, but because I felt too much, and none of it fit neatly into a verse, and even when it did, I had no more voice.

Loving him was complicated. Grieving him was even more so.

To me, Vic was the safest man I knew. He was my ally, my defender, my front-row witness. He sat in dim, sticky-floored bars and watched me sing like we were the only two people in the room. He listened like the art mattered. Like I mattered. He saw me when I felt invisible, and he believed in my voice before I believed in myself.

But to other women, sometimes, he was not that man.

To them, he was the monster that haunted their lives. The name that tightened their chest. The presence that lingered long after he was gone.

Holding those two truths in the same body nearly broke me.

I carried guilt for not answering his call. Anger at myself for loving someone who represented everything I stand against. Rage toward people who spoke in absolutes, who never saw the tortured soul I knew, who never held the version of him that held me up. I questioned my integrity, my feminism, my faith. I questioned whether loving him made me complicit, whether remembering him kindly made me dangerous.

Grief didn’t come gently. It hollowed me out.

Life without him changed me in ways I didn’t recognize at first. I isolated. I disappeared. I stopped going outside, stopped calling people back, stopped dating, stopped living. I became a shell of the person who once laughed loudly and sang freely.

Instead of facing the pain, I ran headfirst into work.

I opened a center for women healing from abuse and sexual assault through art, and later through faith. I poured everything into saving others because I didn’t know how to save myself. I worked three jobs. I started a business. I slept on floors, couches, in hotels, motels, Airbnbs. I lived as transiently as possible to keep costs down, to keep the mission alive, to stay busy enough that I didn’t have to feel the silence Vic left behind or deal with the guilt I felt for loving him, missing him, needing him.

For a long time, it worked. Until it didn’t.

My body kept the score. I was fifty pounds heavier. In and out of doctors’ offices and hospitals. My hair was falling out. I was exhausted, sore, overwhelmed, and financially broken. I had built something beautiful for others while quietly abandoning myself.

Eventually, I was forced to stop running.

Forced to sit with who I had become in my grief.

And in that stillness, something old returned.

I sang.

Not performatively. Not perfectly. I sang through the pain the way I used to. The way I did when music was the only thing that could hold me together. I sang like Vic was still sitting front row center, listening like the art mattered, like I mattered.

Out of that place came three songs.

I didn’t release them loudly. I shared them first with a few close friends. Then quietly, with my followers on my art page on TikTok. I wanted to keep the music close, protected, but I also knew there might be someone out there who needed it the way I did.

These songs are not answers. They are not defenses. They are not apologies.

They are grief in its rawest form. Love without approval. Pain without permission. Art made from a truth that doesn’t resolve cleanly.

And now I’m sharing them here.

That scares me.

Because once something is heard, it can be misunderstood. Once something is released, it no longer belongs only to you. But silence nearly destroyed me, and music saved me again.

So this is me choosing to sing instead of disappearing.

If these songs resonate with you, know this: you are allowed to hold complicated grief. You are allowed to mourn who someone was to you while honoring the harm they caused others. You are allowed to tell the truth without smoothing its edges.

This is my first step back to myself.

And this time, I’m not locking the door.

These songs are marked for ages 18 and over, so you will need to log in to your YouTube account to play them. The songs form a three-part journey through my grief, meant to be played in order, with the final song concluding in a moment of silence.

Song 1 : Sisyphus – ( Click this link to play now)

Song 2: Ghost of me – (Click this link to play now)

Song 3: Echos Fall (Sisyphus Part 2) – (Click this link to play now)