Day 3

“Lucifer son of the morning, I'm going to chase you out of earth,” a clear voice pierces through the accumulations of sound, beats, thuds, crashes, bass strums. She is beautiful, with dreads down her back and  striking eyes. “I’m gonna put on the iron shirt…” I feel the words bubble up from some subterranean, pre-historic memory chest, and Max Romeo is scratchy, scratch scratching away on the beach in Paraíso. He had black curls and dark eyes and a dancer’s body, that gyrated in the hot night. He was never mine. There were hammocks and salty skin, and fish hungrily torn from the bone. Hunger like that only comes when you are young, or infatuated. Before you see the cracks. But tonight the music, oh. I can feel the rhythms seeping into my soul, rending each tight-gripped finger away from my heart one by one, so that it can be. Just be inside of myself and outside.  There is a freedom in such suspension, freedom and fear, and my hips are locked in unsuspecting perpetual motion, keenly tuned to just one thing: his hands moving, striking the skin of the drumhead, call and response. In that trance, the words fade out, her beautiful, sharp-edged song, the room full of people that I have never met, will never meet disappear, it is only the pulsing vibrations that anchor me, vibrations coming out of my mouth, out of every pore, they flow, like blood, like light. They wash over in waves, tantric, mystic, as if we were on the cusp of discovering some uncharted continent.  Then it is late. We walk in the cold under a clear desert sky, stars pulsing their own light-rhythms, centuries old, uninterested in our mortal plight. We belong to one another in deeper ways than we can admit. Impossible ways. The distant beats thump gently across the darkness.  “We can’t,” you say, as your lips contradict you once, twice, three times.