Dear Sweet Water,

You’ve lived inside me for so long that the quiet feels foreign now. The morning after I sent you to my editor, my desk was too still. The papers were gone, the email sent, the story no longer mine alone. I sat for a while looking at the space where you used to be. I listened for the small sacred noise of becoming and heard silence.

This stage, where art becomes work, is always bittersweet. For years, you asked everything of me: time, faith, the kind of honesty that hurts. You became my weather, my rhythm, my way of seeing. Now you’re gone, and I have to learn how to live with the quiet.

You carry so much—a blueswoman, her daughter, the loves and losses that shaped them. You carry their hauntings and mine. You’ve asked me to remember the places that made us. You asked for the granular memories of Texas, the church, and silences we learned to live inside.

When I pressed send, I thought of the women who sang. Billie, Ella, Chaka, Nina and all the rest whose voices shaped generations. I thought of Gayl Jones and her warning:

Songs are devils. It’s your own destruction you’re singing.

Maybe writing you has been a necessary haunting, something in the making for years.

The ninth draft of you demanded to be set free. To no longer belong only to me. To let other hands carry you, other eyes see you.

Maybe the brief quiet will teach me something new about faith, rest, and what comes after the song leaves you.

With love,
Rae