I want to talk about touch, how it’s the only sense I fully trust. When I doubt my ears, my eyes, or both, I find the world with my fingers, skin and lips.

I can almost see and hear her, lilting through the kitchen in her white nylon underwear.

I work puzzles by going over the edges of one piece with my forefinger and thumb as I hunt for the matching piece on the table. My eyes pick out the inverse of what my fingers feel, as if my hands and eyes together are what someone else’s eyes are without assistance from a secondary sense.

I have routinely felt my way over a new lover’s body with my face, chest and tongue. It was nearly always a sensual experience. But it was also a sensual experience—a way of learning, through touch, if this was a person I wanted in my life. I’ve even used my eyelashes to find out what my ears and eyes could not tell me about a partner.

For more than a decade, I felt my way through music. I started by opening the faux velvet-lined case of my new flute and running my fingers over its perfect, machine-made nickel keys. It took me days to bring the mouthpiece to my lower lip. Taking the instrument in with my fingertips was all I wanted or needed during those first encounters.

I am convinced, now, that I could have kept playing the flute if the notes had not been named after letters of the alphabet. I believe this connection caused my visual dyslexia to leak into my fingers, tangling them up like the piece of driftwood my father proudly displayed in our front flowerbed. I would play the note I had come to know as “E,” and my fingers would try to play the note I had come to know as “F,” most likely because capital E and capital F look very similar.

I made it a long way with music despite my dyslexia, most likely because touch was involved. When I relaxed my mind enough, to the extent that I felt I was no longer in my body, the notes became what they were: whole and pure sounds that represented, but could not be extracted from, the universe—sounds unadulterated by our arbitrary assignation to them of letters or our perverted desire to pull them apart the way a curious child might want to pull the wings off a living dragonfly.

I loved music enough to take it as far as I could. And now I know why, in the end, I had to set it aside. There was nothing more I could do. No matter how much I practiced or how hard I tried, I was never going to have perfect, or even relative, pitch—and I was never going to get my fingers right 100 percent of the time.

(When creating music, you only have one chance to position your fingers and mouth. If you miss that synchronicity, you sound the wrong note—or a disastrously shrill noise that lies between notes and is not unlike the wheeze I imagine being emitted by a bird shot in the throat. Composing with words is much more forgiving because you can backtrack and change mistakes or, when speaking, you can pause—and it’s OK because there’s no tempo or conductor or orchestra mercilessly driving you forward.)

There was also the matter of listening, of hearing. I was unable to separate chords into individual tones, a requirement of my ear training classes. I was also unable to hear any tonal progressions, save for the perfect fourth and minor second, the former popularized by “Here Comes the Bride,” the latter by the theme song for “Jaws.” Even with this imprinting, there were days when the perfect fourth and minor second were beyond me. I couldn’t hear them in my head, let alone give them voice.

While I feel a renewed sense of mourning with regard to my loss of music, knowing it was my dyslexia that held me back, I also feel more indebted to music than ever. I am certain that when I set music aside and gravitated to writing and literature, I recruited the musical pathways in my brain to handle all the reading, writing, speaking, and other visual and auditory processing my new interests demanded. I believe my ability to hear the rhythm and tonality of texts is an outgrowth of my language pathways taking up residence in my musical pathways. Sure, it’s a little awkward, kind of like steering a ship along a set of railroad tracks, but it’s working for me. Somehow, it’s been working for decades, without my even knowing that my ship was, in fact, on a set of railroad tracks, and that those tracks were not submerged in water.

In some ways, my heart wants to break where music is concerned. Look what it did for me. Look what it gave me, asking nothing in return. All so that, one day, I would be able to speak. And write. And keep speaking and writing. And to keep singing my tone-deaf song, my ugly little song that feels more precious than ever to me, the imperfect song that connects me back to my mother as if she and I are two diminished seventh chords standing side by side on a treble clef.

And there she is. I can almost see and hear her, lilting through the kitchen in her white nylon underwear from Anthony’s department store, humming “The Girl from Ipanema”:

Tall and tan and young and lovely, / The girl from Ipanema goes walking, And when she passes / I smile, but she doesn’t see, / She just doesn’t see, No she doesn’t see

And I see my mother now. And I sing for my mother now. And I write for her now. And now her voice is my voice. And now I know her mind—one that always put the cereal in the refrigerator, that couldn’t balance the checkbook, that never wrote anything by hand, that loved to talk but not to read.

And I have her mind. And I am not sorry. And if I could reach out and touch her, I would. I would hold her hand and tell her it’s OK that she gave me this wiring, and I would sing her a lullaby and urge her to rest, just rest, and to please not worry about me anymore.