I remember listening to techno and thinking that it was beautiful. The music and my hand had the same rhythms, soft hair and deep eyes underneath me, and there are certain soft sounds that I will never forget and always taste his skin when I hear them.

I remember the way Rie's eyes looked in the rear-view mirror while I was listening to "Bitch".

Classical music is something I put on when I'm downtown, because suddenly all the cars are locked in an intricate court dance, bow and turn, promenade, choosing partners across the intersection and filing past to the stately sound of violins.

I used to dance around the house singing "Roll Over, Beethoven" at the top of my lungs when I was having a bad day because it cheered me up immensely.

I remember putting on "Wandering Star", playing it on a tiny portable tape recorder that I'd set up beside my bed. My eyes were closed, head back on my pillow, and I was dreaming of someone I'd never met, wondering why he'd said THIS song, this was one I needed to hear. Wishing that I knew what it felt like to nibble his ear. Imagining a collar for him. Thinking that he was perfect, that he was me.

I remember hours of writing, my parents asleep, the headphones on. Words fell from thin air, the sounds stirring thoughts, music blending emotion and dreams, my fingers following the rhythm and nothing coming out that wasn't pure, honest, real... forget the punctuation, the spelling, it was stream-of-thought and it was the music that brought it alive.

I wrote about music, sung about sitting on the roof of my father's office, listening to the radio and watching the sun rise, wondering if I would burn. I wrote about the sort of song that stirs only in shadows, knifeblades and whimpers and the beat of a terrified heart turning into a symphony, destruction and depravity at its musical best. I wrote about sounds, speech and motion... about everything that made me alive... and I did it to a constantly-shifting beat, new songs, new dreams, but always the same underlying theory: the music brings the words. The sounds, the songs, the purity of it... that is where I live, what I am.

Text is merely a way to catch the music's echo.

I remember crying, listening to "Tears" as he said he loved me, my kitten promising me the world in three simple words, and it wasn't those words that brought me to tears, it was the sounds that flowed through me, music that matched him, that he had shown me, combined with the emotions he flooded me with.

I remember dancing to gothic music, spin and turn and stomp and sigh, angsty and tasty. Richie, tempting... and Caleb, delicious... gods, my Angel, I remember listening to "Black Hole Sun" while she talked, and the way her eyes gleamed at the chorus, her pain so clear, she was like me... my Angel? Did I just say that? *wry grin* History is being edited here, friends. She was never mine, much as I wished it. I'm not so egotistical as to claim that... she... daya. Mine, perhaps, in the way that Jesus belongs to the Christians, or in the way that you might say "My favorite person/thing/whatever is..."

No true claim.

I lay claim to very few things. Kadin... Caleb... Nick... Nre, if I'm not careful... and the music that spirals around within me, escaping into little black lines and curves, turning itself into collages and wallpapers, dancing through speech and into dreams... the music that keeps me alive, that IS my life.