I'm putting on my clothes with my back to the world in the rec center locker room and behind me, up on a bench so high, to her, that it would have been a freefall to the ground, is a toddler singing one line from 'Cecilia':

"Cecilia, you're breaking my heart, you're shaking my confidence daily..."

over and over again, while struggling to tie her shoes.

After awhile I notice that she is screwing up her shoe-tying on purpose; she's tying the laces in triple, quadruple knots, then picking them loose with her fingernails, combing them straight, and doing it all over again, just so she can continue to crouch on her bench absorbed in her own voice, her own Cecilia world.

Sometimes when she gets to the end of the line she'll say it in a normal speaking voice a couple of times, then turn it into a dialogue between the singer and Cecilia, who, in her mind, seems to be a fancy lady who only wants to go to dinner parties. Cecilia keeps ardently defending herself against the song, saying over and over that she didn't mean to break anyone's heart, and the singer keeps saying back that she did anyway, and then the song starts again, that one line, over and over and over again as the laces are intently picked and combed.

She doesn't notice me and I am trying hard not to change that, because when I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in these nonsensical worlds, talking to myself about them, imagining, really, that this dialogue, this scene, was happening, and I would sing the soundtrack, go through the body motions, be the man or the woman or the cat or whoever this world needed me to be. I would be doing this, completely unaware of my surroundings - I might have been on the playground, or at the beach, or even, once, in class - and people would come up to me, tap me on the shoulder, say 'hello, honey...' or even just pass right through my line of vision and smile ingratiatingly, and the cuter or more curious they thought I was, the more mortified I would be, and the more silent I would fall.

I hated it when people saw me being creative in general. I remember picking on a banjo when I was about seven, not knowing how to play, but this song was tumbling through my head and it had a banjo accompaniment, so I was sitting on the couch picking this one phrase over and over and singing over the top of it to try and flesh it out. I had thought my mom was in the backyard, and so I was singing loudly, and talking to myself between phrases - it was easier to talk than think - but right after a particularly high twirl of the voice my mom came floating down the stairs, which meant that she had been in the house the whole time.

I can still feel the sickening thump my stomach made against my ribs, and how softly I put the banjo down, and the rest of the day that I spent at the playground, hiding, trying to shove the song back down my throat so I wouldn't accidentally enter that same reverie at the playground.

The girl in the locker room, though, sees me just as I am trying, impossibly, to put on my backpack without jingling loudly right in her ear, and I hear her surprised intake of breath as she stops her singing, and I'm thinking, oh shit, waiting for the wail, or worse, the retreat, as I peer over my shoulder at her, trying to make only nonthreatening eye contact and a timid smile.

But when she catches my eye she just grins openly, says, "Hi!" and goes back to singing without barely missing a beat.

That girl is my hero.