Last night I sat in the front row. I watched Mark read (perform the readings really) from the new book. I listened to his voice, I've loved it since the first time I put in "Don't be Scared" when I still lived at my cousin's place over 6 years ago and the first few seconds played. I remember putting it on the big stereo downstairs cause I was running about the house cleaning. His voice dropped me, stopped me, floored me to the spot, half way up the stairs, rag in hand, breathless, feckless, caught up within, caught up without, flowing somewhere else on the whisper. "I still get nightmares, in fact I get them so often I should be used to them by now...". Just those words that moment, in my life, in my world, the seconds paused extra in between just for me. I couldn't move, even if I wanted to, which I'm nt entirely sure I did, that is to say want. Want was too base a word, it was more like crave. That first scent of rum to the alcoholic 10 years on the wagon. Only I was just 5 years on the wagon as it were. I was 5 years alone. 5 years with every first waking thought trying to suss out where my Adam was and why I didn't feel him next to me. 5 years of remembering, feeling him die in my arms again everytime my freshly stunned conscious mind tried to remind me that, "yes Jessica there really is no Santa Claus, and you'll never feel him breathe again". His voice was my Adam, my Johnny, my truest love, my oldest friend, and I knew it like I knew Adams breathing at 4am over the phone sound asleep on those loong nights I couldn't sleep for being so far from him and just needing to hear it, to close my eyes clutching the phone close and feeling the tension drop, my heart, then racing to slow and resume it's languid glide towards my ribcage at his proximity.
I've met Mark before - 6 years ago. I was working all day the day the tour took him to my store. He was a brilliant sweet man, with a lovely smile, and eyes that I already found myself looking in too many moments. I met him that morning as a person off the bus, not knowing who he was, that he was "that guy". By the time I found out it was too late. He was already transformed from the creature who somehow created that piece, those words which had altered me on some base level to that bright guy who didn't flinch when I, not paying too much attention, had blurted out "Qu'est que tu veux?" for the non-francophones basically the equivalent of asking in my best ghetto slang "Whatchoo want?". He caught my eye again and just said large mocha with a smile we shared and I hid it like contraband.
I don't know how Only Revolutions is going to be for me, nor I for it, when I finally get thru it. But last night I was counting full moons again - we adopted that phrase after the Brandon Lee interview circa The Crow - when he was on about how we don't know how many full moons we have left, but that there is indeed a finite number. I realized I had travelled the distances, paid the tolls, financially, physically. And yet somehow all I could think was "this can't be the last time" I have no idea what the future holds, how many more sunsets, how many more kisses, how many more bodies, how many more moments flying down the interstate at over 90 mph, screaming Iggy Pop at the top of my lungs, cars and trucks parting like butter before a hot knife, completely safe confident, competent, and secure in my own skin and surroundings.
Friends and strangers alike, much like a childe just returned from an alien vessel, something has altered, exactly what i do not yet know. But this is going to be interesting. I've had 4 hours of sleep (really lying here and shaking for more, sleeping for less) and these are the thoughts tumbling and bumbling out of my brain. Now wretched up onto the page because the walls here are sick of listening to them. And for some reason today I do not want to be here in my box allone.
