(But I Don't Know What to Say)

Sunday night, 34th street and the air is growing warmer by the minute, you can't explain it. He runs out of a taxi and you decide there's still time for a drink because we can't go in there sober. There's the usual anticipation, the unstoppable giggles in your chest when his rock'n'roll hair walks out onto the stage. Someone closer to the stage is smoking pot: great giant puffs float out over the crowds.

And then there is a moment, when he sings that song you've heard in the back of your head since the millennium was new, and it was a song that was yours and no one else's. You sat there on the patio of one of your first apartments in life, so young and unsure, with nowhere to go but forward, listening to his words and thinking One day I will move to New York and all the rest will follow. You moved to New York, listened to his song and thought No matter what else I do in life, I am here now.

I stared up at the strobe lights and let everything else wash away. There were no crowds around me, no Monday morning ahead; there was no deep, aching longing for skin that will never touch mine like I wish it would, and no shattered sense of feeling half of a whole.

I do not need anything else, I thought into the void, I do not need anyone else.

This adventure is mine, and mine alone.