BB Grey–musings

“Writing is like singing in the dark—you don’t know if you’re in tune until someone listens.”

I ran my voice through the literary giants—Hemingway, Kafka, Proust, Dostoevsky—let their chords vibrate in my throat, tried to shape my words to their resonance. But the sound was always off, a discordant note in a song I wasn’t meant to sing.

The critique came swiftly, as it always does. The comparisons, the doubts. But in the friction of trying to match their pitch, I found something else—a whisper, thin at first, but persistent. It hummed beneath my ribs as I moved through the day, catching rhythm where I least expected.

Some days, I thought I had a song. The melody sharpened, the tempo steadied. A bassline of reason, a harmony of chaos. It held together—until it didn’t. Some words were met with applause, more were met with silence, a few with outright rejection. The tomato-throwing kind. The vaudeville hook dragging me offstage. But the song remained.

And so I sing it—off-key, unpolished, sometimes beautiful, often raw. I cover one ear to hear myself better, adjust, adjust, adjust. Not to match their voices, but to make mine ring clear.