The sky's changing color and I must leave fast

I know where I learned "The Great Selkie of Sule Skerry": my mother used to sing it as a lullaby, omitting until I was old enough to listen to Joan Baez the last verse with the death of the selkie and his son. I don't know where I learned "Tam Lin." I hazard a combination of the Jane Yolen picture book and the collection of Child ballads on my mother's shelf. It was instantly and powerfully important to me: holding fast to what you love, no matter what shapes it takes. From the direction of that description, I assume it is apparent that when I framed the ballad against my own life, I placed myself as Janet. (I had to reckon in 2010 with the fact that I'd let someone go. What they had changed into would never turn, back or forward, into my own healthy spell-broken love.) It wasn't until this afternoon, when I was laying out my medical history of 2006 for the latest doctor, that it clicked with me that that year I'd been someone else's Tam Lin: and they'd let me burn.

(I wrote "Teinds" early in 2007. I wonder about that now.)

To persist with this metaphor, it was seven years that I lived at my parents' house, although I believe Lexington to be an objective improvement on hell.

Something in this wants to be a poem, but it is a quarter to four in the morning and I need to sleep.