Everyone's soul has a song, you know.

---

Gently, I tap on the drum-taut surface of your breastbone with my just-too-long fingernails, trying to find the tempo of your life. Not the time signature, not the way you fit all your little activities into blocks and bursts and cycles of regularity - that will come later, when I know you better. Maybe when you're dead, and I can lay my head on your still-warm corpse and listen to the echoes of the last throbs of your veins, I will know your time signature. But for now, all I want to know is the pace that you take.

Do you swoop and dip through life so quickly that conductor Fate has a hard time keeping up with your erratic swirls? Do you keep the heavy, ponderous backbeat of the world's orchestra? Are you a sheep in your herd or are you a frontrunner? Are you first chair or six billionth? Are you rude and brassy, shoving your way to the front of the auditory melange? Or do you add elaboration, silver and delicate, to the main theme?

I straddle your hips, keeping the tempo that feels the most right, and strike a chord experimentally down your ribcage. I smile, because I know what you are now. You aren't part of our orchestra at all - well, you're a part that's schismed. You're a low, folky sound, handcrafted and perfectly suited to back up songs about moonshine and lost lovers.

Your chuckle just confirms this, like your low drawl. "You ready to go again, sweetheart?"

I frown at you, wishing I could spare a hand to put a finger to my lips. "Shh. I'm listening."

---

I've felt many people's melodies meld into my bones, before you. I know the routine, know what to expect, know how after a week or so, my own changes. I can feel the notes shift, or the key alter, or maybe I'll stumble across an unexpected rest or two.

I say 'feel' because I've never heard my own song, though I wish to. Maybe this isn't something for mortal ears. Maybe the gypsies had the right of it - that Man is not meant to see his own face clearly.

I've tried, of course, to clean the mirror.

---

My forefinger thumps along the protruding line of my collarbone, exposed and airy as I lay flat on my back. I arch myself up, just a little, and let my mouth gape open to let the sound flow loose and limber from me. But it doesn't work. All I can hear is my same hollow thumping.

The next time I try a stethoscope. My heartbeat lubs and dubs the same throb as everyone else's - maybe a little fainter, a little faster, than the average. There are no lovely chords and strums lingering inside my chest. But they must be somewhere.

Now, I try my veins - cut five evenly spaced lines parallel and longways on each forearm to give them a proper medium, cut deeply to try and find the soul of it, not just the fancy elaboration of the topside. And as the blood wells out, I can see it. See the drops form good, proper notes on my staff, and if I audiate hard enough I can almost hear it, set the colors in my head dancing to their tune. I can't be bothered with the knocking and screaming on the other side of the bathroom door - I have far more important things to worry about.

---

The funny thing about melodies is, when the changers leave, it doesn't go back. The arrangement is permanently shifted, will never be quite the same again. When I was younger, I used to resent it. I didn't want to be changed.

But I've come to see that whether the changes were good or bad, I come out the richer for it, with my basebeat the same but the elaborations more elegant and mature.

So maybe that's why I'm not meant to hear my song. I am still a work in progress, and it's no good to hear something until the composer is good and ready.

---

I hope, when I am dying, for my time-signature to appear on my staff-paper scars, for liver spots or bruises or marks of some sort to denote my melody - at least a measure or two. I want those gathered about my deathbed to hear the music to, to set themselves dancing with the memory of my soul. And I want to see the graceful patterns that my life has woven upon my skin.