She doesn’t know what a “dominant chord” is. Let alone a “diminished” one.

Major and minor, she’s a little more familiar with. She’s heard them often enough. But she still couldn’t describe them if you asked.

The most she could say, if she thought really really hard, is that major chords make her heart flutter, and minor ones make it shiver.

She doesn’t even really know the names of all the notes. Certainly, A, B and C are some of them… but where does it stop? And why are some of them “sharp” or “flat”? What could that mean?

Is there such a thing as an I sharp?

She thinks, if that note did exist, it would probably sound kind of scary.

But an N flat might be really calming, on the other hand.

If you asked her, she would tell you she lacks the diligence, the grace, the prodigious talent, and the human touch of her bandmates. Her grip on it is so unsteady, it feels like one wrong step might send her tumbling into the abyss.

…She thinks music is a lot like the ocean.

A vast expanse, too wide and too deep for her to ever comprehend. A maelstrom which thrashes her around in its violent currents, drags her down to dark and unfathomable places.

It’s terrifying.

And she loves it.

She might not know what the notes are called, but somehow, she can sing them. She can match the rhythm of the drums, follow the movement of the chords, the lilt of the melodies. It’s like it’s seared into her very being, programmed into her biology.

It lets her say what she could otherwise never say. It’s the only way she knows to rend open the walls of her heart, to show the world what lies inside it.

Before humans were human, they lived in the sea.

Maybe, she wonders, music has been inside us for just as long.

She doesn’t know what a dominant chord is, either. But she doesn’t need to.

After all, her guitar will conjure up any sound she might possibly imagine without so much as a conscious thought. Giving it a name would only slow her down.

She knows every note by heart, just as closely as you might know your closest family. Every fret on her fretboard has its own personality, its own color, texture, taste. Every chord she plays sends her to its own little world.

They’ve all been with her for as long as she can remember.

She knows people try to give them names, to force it all into some kind of system. She can intuit it well enough when she sees it, but she finds it all very silly.

She cares very little for neat little boxes, for rigorous systems, for explanations.

To her, music is freedom itself.

The pulse of the kick drum, the twin wailing of electric guitars; only in the midst of it all does she ever truly feel like herself.

It is the very air she breathes. The blood in her veins.

It is what gives her soul its shape.

Neither of them know the rules, or how to follow them.

One feels like she can’t. The other simply won’t.

One finds them overwhelming. The other finds them suffocating.

One feels lost in its waters; the other could not imagine ever being anywhere else.

Put that way, they couldn’t seem more different.

And yet, when they plug in; when the drums kick in, beating on their syncopated patterns, when the bass growls awake; and when they look each other in the eyes and begin to harmonize, when her voice follows in the wake of her guitar; they feel like one and the same person.

In the cold light of day, they both speak the same language.