Underwater.

[icebluenothing]

This is what you want, this is what you get --

PIL loud and echoing dreamlike. I'm dancing, by myself on the floor of the Mercury, and the club is apparently empty, save myself and the unseen DJ, and windbourne. A blurry light shimmers on the floor, and for a moment it feels like we are far below a blood red ocean. I look over at her writing in her spiral notebook and I feel like we belong here, like sharks. She and I are the only creatures who can survive at these depths.

The music reminds me, deep in my bones, that there really was something going on in the Eighties, that there was a sound to this decade beyond the pop crap on the radio. There are singers with edges in their voices, drum machines with deathmarch staccato inevitability, synthesized melodies raw-edged and uncomplicated, the busy-signal hum of the end of the world.

I dance, and chase lasers with my moving arms, wishing their green light could pierce my skin like tattoo needles and leave its neon Spirograph pattern burning under my flesh. On the video screen, the world has already ended -- the Duke of New York has the terrified President up against a bullet-ridden wall. Donald Pleasance's little trapped pig eyes staring out of the screen as digital errors reduce his image to jerky boxes. He doesn't understand what's happening to him. This isn't a future he was ready for. This future is much more dangerous, what happened to our New York much worse, and there is no escape from it.

There is escape here, for a moment, and I dance, spinning, wanting to keep spinning dizzy until I fall. I want to give up air and breathe only sweet smoke, give up water for anything that will burn its way down my throat and leave me as dizzy as dancing and as breathless as kisses. I have already given up the ground for concrete and fire for laserlight, here at the bottom of our ocean.

I'm writing now, she dancing, our places silently changed like we already know all the steps of this dance.

The movie has changed -- now it's Logan's Run, and I have to smile. I am, I suppose, renewing myself here at Carousel, but my life didn't end at thirty. If anything, it's only just now beginning, with this breath and the next and the next.

This is not the life I expected. But I'm happier than I could have imagined. This is what you want, this is what you get.

This moment is perfect, and it will end, and be gone --

But if I'm fast enough, clever enough, my pen sharp enough, I can catch it and pin it to the page.

Comments

[anchiale.livejournal.com]

You know, the few points in my life I've spent time dancing, clubbing I've wanted to capture it in writing: the sparse and militant nature, the death-worship, the grateful oblivion. I've never managed it.

...with deathmarch staccato inevitability...

*shakes head* Well, there it is. Just like that. Thanks for this. It made my day. :)

Apropos of nothing

[wendolen.livejournal.com]

Reading aarongm's journal and going through his pictures of Portland graffiti, this one (http://img16.photobucket.com/albums/v48/ajgm1/moremorestencils.jpg) made me think of you.