She Floats
Vanessa Carlton

Watching puddles gather rain
Theres no better place to lay
Shes as fine as dandelions blowing in the wind
Shes not thinking about anything...
She floats... She floats...
Floats...

Wearing black patent mary janes
She steps out in to the rain
She's as dry as clear blue skies
Swallowing you whole
God knows secrets though I'm told
She floats... She floats...
Floats...

ahhh... ahhh...

She's as fine as dandelions blowing in the wind
Shes not thinking she's listening

She floats... She floats... Floats...
Floats...
She floats... She floats... Floats...
Floats...

Everything is still now. There is nothing to fight any longer, no current to fight. There isn't even a flow to follow. Be still and just listen.

When I hit the PLAY button, all I could hear was static, and I settled in, closing my eyes, and waited for the first song to begin. It didn't. Not in the next few minutes, not ever. Then I realized: the CD was blank.

Maybe it was supposed to be a joke. Or something profound. But as I lay there, it only seemed like silence filling my ears. And the thing was, it was so freaking loud.

It was the weirdest thing, so different from music. The sound was nothing, empty, but at the same time, it pushed everything else out, quieting me enough that I was able to make out something distant, hard to hear. But it was there, albeit softly, coming to me from some dark place I'd never seen but still knew well.

Shhh, [...] It's just me.

But these words were only the middle of the story. There was a beginning here, too. And I knew suddenly that if I stayed where I was, in all that quiet, and didn't run from it, I would hear it. [...]

All I'd ever wanted was to forget. But even when I thought I had, pieces had kept emerging, like bits of wood floating up to the surface that only hint at the shipwreck below. [...] Because that is what happens when you try to run from the past. It doesn't just catch up: it overtakes, blotting out the future, the landscape, the very sky, until there is no path left except that which leads through it, the only one that can ever get you home.

I understood now. This voice, the one that had been trying to get my attention all this time, calling out to me, begging me to hear it--it wasn't Will's. It was mine.

-Just Listen, Sarah Dessen