I was in the car with my husband yesterday, Thomson Twins jangling in the background, when I started to think of what it means to be untethered.  I am parentless, floating without the anchors that rooted my bones to the earth, my blood to the sky. My identity was already fractured, unstable at best, but now I become the definition of loss each time I open my eyes to inhale the sun, each time I close them again to swallow the moon.  I have been emptied out so many times, turning to the memory of voices that fade with the passing of years.  I became old when I should have been steeped in youth, threw my eyes into the grave, forgot how to look to the sky for solace, for discovery.  I am recognized by the shape of my diseases, ailments that strangle my determination, but I don’t recognize my own face. I am the word on the page that erases itself but never stops searching for sound. I am a war, a need to be invisible and seen, to be silence and noise. Is this what it means to be untethered?