crash, crash, crescendo.

i'm aware of movement, mostly. i have to take in small details and work them out one at a time, otherwise i'd be spun, knuckles to the wall. there's too much going on, too much changing, too much happening to keep my eyes on it all.

culmination is key. i wear black, perhaps, to tie it all together and consider carefully the placement of my commas so you will know exactly what i mean.

because i needed a signature, i walked into a conversation at precisely the right moment and two days later found me once again introduced to the other side of the microphone. i can't explain the nature of such a thing; rediscovery had the same shock of still, cool water that had hooked me in the first place.

for three years, i've been fine without music. i've missed it in quiet moments, on occasion smiled at the sound of myself against Ben Gibbard in the car, but i kept it to myself. brushed away the itinerant pang of longing while my guitars sat dusty in some corner of whatever bedroom i happened to occupy.

it had to work this way; there was no room for wiggling or wanting, only that rush as i hear it over the p.a. - dripping or gushing or folding in a rustle like silk - so many minutes later. there had to be shock, i had to be punched in the stomach with remembering. in the intervening years the sound of me has broadened and deepened, grown past adolescence, started smoking camels and learned how to walk in heels.

what i hear on the monitors is not a product of ego, really. if anything it has to be a symptom. to me it sounds like a door slamming shut with finality, like a man dusting his hands off one another in satisfaction at a job well done. it sounds like the turn of a key in the ignition of the car that drove me home from california.

i have to sweat, shake my hair back, i have to swing what hips i have and step forward on the glide of a finger, mimick finality with the smell of hot metal and working electronics in my nose and the feeling in the back of my throat, wrapping my muscles around something the shape of which is nameless - not to squeeze but to hold, to expel slowly, slowly. sugar, something soft and silky and molten in my mouth.

it pours, and it looks like the sound of every moment of the last decade. it looks like lindsay's face when we crossed the border, it looks like scott's hand on my waist, it looks like the bags under my mother's eyes the week my father died and she was awake for six days straight. it looks like that man who crossed his legs under flourescent light leaning forward and touching my arm when he laughed and it looks like that slick dark parking lot and fingers on my mouth, the taste of blood and the pain of kissing and it looks like life.

a stolen second of pleasure, the flavor of what's to come. this is what i plead with myself about on the nights that i can't sleep - don't let it go, lindsay, don't let it go - wear yourself like a sundress and stay poised to spring forward every time you're scared. nothing specific, just don't let it go. this must have been it.

i guess i just always needed a moment.