A silver-haired woman walks along a stream, playing a charango. Sak Nik's toes leave imprints on the cool, wet moss and squish the soil beneath them. A forced smileu masks Sak Nik’s face. She has been walking soullessly for countless moons in search of a lost book, hoping that the music from her charango will help her find it. It went missing during a dark period of constant failure and self loathing in her life that drowned her in despair. The songbook and instrument were given to her by her grandfather, "Toma, in case you ever forget us or yourself." "Of course not," I responded naively. He'd imbued the book with music from a lifetime of joys and pain.

During her journey, Sak Nik wonders,

"If I were a cook, my savory, sweet, and crispy edibles would lure every palate in the world to my table. Kings and beggars would line up to taste my food, and I would use that opportunity to ask them all if they had seen my book.

Even so, my taste buds are dull with grief," she thinks.

"If I were trained as a hunter, I would use my keen sense of smell to track the musk, sweat, and excrement of every animal in the world and force them, at knifepoint, to disclose their knowledge of the songbook. Those without answers would join the thousand-foot-tall red mound of severed heads behind me.

Still, I despise hunters," she whispers to the fox hiding in a bush, enjoying her song.

"If I had learned to dive, I would run my fingers through every grain of sand in the depths of the ocean, open every clam, and probe every trench in search of the book.

Yet, you scare me, because I don’t know you and new things often hold me back." She says to the purple and orange starfish at the beach.

"If I were a Cardinal of the church, I would pray every hour and proselytize every day about the songbook's divine inspiration, in the hope that my followers would become zealots and stop at nothing to retrieve it," she says to a priest during confession. He shakes his head.

But alas, she is a musician, and playing the charango is all she knows.

One day, Sak Nik walks next to a large pond brimming with a colony of Great Blue Herons. Her music causes the feathered mass to turn toward her, fly over the water, and join her on the shore. Nearby, in a nest made of salt grass, rest two pale blue-green eggs and familiar music notes on an open book. She walks up to it. The notes scream with her grandfather's pain and grip her throat.

Rustling and raspy kuk-kuk-kuk-kuks grow in volume.

"Do you know this book?" asks the oldest heron in the colony.

She remembers her grandfather muffled screams at her grandmother's funeral and her five-year-old self trying to comfort him by saying,

"It's okay to scream sometimes, Grandpa. I always feel better after."

Unable to speak, she nods at the heron.

Then she says, "It's... mine."

The colony's kuk-kuks swell into a cacophony.

"This book seems important to you," says the elder.

She smiles and turns the vellum pages of the songbook.

"That's my grandfather's marriage, the birth of my dad, and my birth," she points to the tunes that skip across the pages in major keys. She flips more pages, "My grandmother's illness, her death, and other hard moments." Sak Nik closes the book and her eyes.These compositions weigh down their pages with minor keys.

A heron beside her wraps its broad soft wing around her back.

"It's my family's story, and I lost it during a long dark period of shame in my life. Survival was all that mattered at the time. But I've changed. I've forgiven myself; I am here now, and thanks to you, I am reconnecting with my past."

"We are happy to have held it for you this long," smiles the elder.

Sak Nik raises her charango and plays for them. The birds form a circle in the sky and dive in unison to the rhythm of the music, celebrating her happiness.