There’s a scream I keep that only comes out when the house is empty.
I know its address by heart. Mostly the car, or the kitchen with the windows up and something heavy on. The light goes red, the chorus lands, and out it comes, from somewhere lower than my throat. Ugly and enormous and not for anybody. It does not care what it sounds like because nobody is there to have an opinion. By the time the light turns green I’m somebody who just needed that.
Everyone keeps a voice like this, even the people who would deny it. Yours might not be a scream. Yours might be the shower belt, the full one, the one with the air behind it. Maybe yours is the cry voice. Maybe it’s the laugh that only shows up when you’re alone with your phone at 1am. Whatever shape it takes, the places it’s allowed to exist have one thing in common: no ears. The car with the windows up. The house when everyone’s gone. The stairwell nobody uses.
I’ve been sitting with why that is.
The easy answer is embarassment. Loud joy is awkward, loud pain is worse. But I don’t think that’s the engine. I think it’s the excuse. The engine is being watched mid-feeling. There’s a difference between controlling your voice and being in hiding with it. A work voice, a phone voice, a please-and-thank-you voice, those are choices. Costumes you put on for the shape of a room. But the scream isn’t a costume. The scream is the original, the first draft of me before any room got a vote. And letting someone see the original feels like handing over the deed to the property.
The body knows this. Half the time when I scream along to a track I’ve heard a thousand times, the words barely matter anymore. It isn’t about the lyrics. It’s exhaust. It’s the pressure of a whole polite day finding the only exit it’s allowed. Pressure doesn’t need a reason. It just needs a door.
That’s part of why shows matter so much to me. A metal show is one of the last public places with a license for it. Two hundred strangers and every single one of them screaming, and nobody flinches, nobody laughs, nobody asks if you’re okay in the voice that means stop. You paid money to stand in a room where the original voice is legal. Sit with that a second. We buy tickets for the privilege of sounding like ourselves.
Lately what gets me is the cost of keeping it locked the rest of the time. A voice you ration starts to feel like it belongs to somebody else. You keep it in a drawer so long you forget the drawer is yours. And volume isn’t only loudness. Volume is the truth dial. The people who love you are not loving the polite voice. They’re loving whatever is under it, the thing the polite voice is a lid for. Keep the lid on long enough and you start doing all your business with the lid.
So. The plan, same as always. Simple, slightly terrifying. Let it out a little closer to the edge of the house. Sing loud enough that the neighbors get a rumor. The empty house was never the destination. It’s the rehearsal space. Everything you practice in there is supposed to come out of the car eventually and live at your actual volume, in front of people who get to hear it.
The scream doesn’t need an audience. But it shouldn’t need the empty house either.