To audience

I stood there and felt the room crackle around me. (pause) What does that mean? It sounds good. Maybe I’m reaching. The moment felt so good, I need to come up with something to describe it. And this is because our own version of events – events like this one, like when she pressed her hand into mine – seem cheap and inconsequential by their immediate fading. Because that is what they always seem to do. Its the same reason we feel a compulsion to snap a picture of everything. I know my own memory isn’t good enough to provide an adequate accounting for the things that just transpired so I must take a photo. Or tell a tall tale. With superlatives. I’m mos definitely reaching.

But the mind has to be good enough. Because the slow-gathering snowball of us has been building steam to something monumental. The first sight, gazing from afar, bumbled intros,  blah-blah – I knew it would get here. And I knew it would be this good. And maybe I don’t want to take a fuckin’ picture to remember it by. Something I’ll just put in a frame until the inevitable day I’ll have to rip it out, tear it to pieces and drop those pieces off a bridge into a slow-moving stream – where I’ll watch the torn bits of our faces slip away with the gentle current.

I’m definitely reaching now.