Music lives like the wind, the witches of power all around, all these controlling creatures who have lost control of themselves. I am a man of shapes and sounds, ass and cunt, tits, stomach, shoulders.  Turnabout, intruder.  Hand and voice and breath.    This well of perfume and musk, the world of a woman's hips.

My companion is showing her age.  She has a few greys in her untamed hair, she has a tired smile as she brings me a vodka tonic.  I've been drinking all night, but that doesn't come to mind until the glass sits, untouched, in front of me.  I'm thinking about the shape of a glass while my companion leans back in a wicker chair and watches the women, wondering what she wants.  I know what I want, and I wonder if that haunts her.

I've been writing on a cocktail napkin and she watches out of the corner of her eye as I throw it to the ground.  She picks it up and flattens it out carefully, religiously, then hands it back to me with that faded smile of hers.  We're testing each other.  That's how everything between us has always been defined. 

There are songs and stories in my head.  Scenes from unwritten novels playing out overtop these scenes of life.  She says she sees that in me and, as our eyes meet and hold, I finally believe her. 

Here come this song.  Rasputina cuts the dance music with an alarming jolt and I take a breath.  

At home, five months later, I open my eyes and step away from where I was.

Surrounded by speakers.  With the lights off, I pretend to try and pinpoint where each speaker is, as if I didn't know.  I try to separate the music into five distinct points.  I spin around and put my head back, the chair tilting, and I look up into the space above me.  I think of some things gone by. 

Sometimes, a Saturday finds me outside.  It's springtime again, and I go to a bar alone and sit there, awkward, feeling like I'm being examined.  I feel like a stalker or, every once in a while, like I'm being stalked.  Uncomfortable in my skin.  Sometimes, in the warmer months, I sit in the yard and listen to the night sounds around me, or I drive to a park and sit on the swings and think of my teenage self sitting across from me, on the rotten picnic table, sucking down a Big Gulp and staring right back.  Taking in the thick air, the DC  spring sticking to my clothes.  

Sometimes, a Saturday finds me with empty bottles, sometimes it finds me in bed, fully clothed.  I've been known to call a friend or two, but all we ever talk about is the space between us.

With the girl from Decatur, whose life now has become that space between us, I remember every Saturday night when we were going out. A year of Saturdays - some beautiful, some painful.  Leaning against a sheet metal wall watching a woman dance, her taunting eyes on mine, my old girl thrown into a mix of faux lesbians, there's a short in the back of my mind.  Burning wires stink of West Virginia mountaintop air.  Navigation lights in the distance, a weird lighthouse effect fills the dorm room and mist obscures the library across the campus.  Thin hands and long fingers play on my stomach, her angular face against my back, her words muddled in my mind.  I am surrounded by her smell, candles lit now, her body a shadow with a match.  Her eyes come out of the gloom first like some strange animal.  Too late to dodge the leap of the wolf, I was always mesmerized by the glare of the huntress.  She materializes as she steps closer, doomsday's queen.  She towers over me as I hold very still.  Even though she looks down on me with pity, I still try to hide.  

At the gas pumps, after our night out at the lesbian bar, after our grand reunion, horrible cold biting through my clothes, leaning against her car.  She runs from the food mart at a slant, everything seems to move that way when she's around.  On the curve of the horizon.  She always ran with one hand held against her stomach and the other one flying out wildly.  She yells against the cold, a strange sort of housecat sound.    

Pathetic, clumsy, pale, she strips her clothes off and tries to flirt.  Instead, she has wasted away, sickness inside.  She wants to be sexy as she peels off her pants but she turns to tears and I hold her naked body as she shudders against mortality.  That's no way to spend a Saturday night. 

Looking down on her nest of grey hairs, her smell has changed.  The chain smoking woman, that lovely musk stained by cigarettes.  That sick twist that repulses and chokes.  A smell that brings me back home to a road in Kensington, Maryland.  A child torn apart, left alone to crawl inside his skin. 

So, today, it is exactly five months later.  The evening before I turn 31, another number that means nothing, really. I sit in the corner, alone, and order another beer, looking down at cocktail napkins from January.  "This is where I am," the writing on the napkins begins.  Crumpled blue ink.  Hello birthday boy. 

I'm the last and the waitress is putting chairs on top of the tables.  I look at her over the top of my glasses as she winks and twists her hip, her chest out.  See you next time cowboy.