I pick up my guitar and play a few notes. A rhythm emerges. It is deep and earthy. The way I like it. Something convoluted. A slow song, heavy with purpose and mechanical in design, and yet unsure of itself. It’s the style I’ve been looking for if you can call it a style. Full and powerful but not harsh. Where soul and technicality dovetail into something human. I put down my guitar. I can feel it waiting, there in the corner.

But there is something else waiting.

Who are all these people? I’ve been trying to find out for so long, and in doing so I may have let my own definition slip into obscurity. But I can’t turn around now. Maybe one day I’ll find time for myself, but the projection of the soul on the outer world is what I need and what I crave to emulate. I hope I will harness and sharpen the steady music in my fingertips, and give it shape. The fingers that pluck the strings, the same fingers that tap the keys.

I know what I want. I want the explosion of the sunset frozen in time yet leaving its dying warmth intact. I want the feeling of the thin coating of ice on the railing solidified in ice of a different kind. I want the ghosts of trees and factories and lamp posts and wheels and beaches and their passive emotions bottled up for safekeeping. The bottomless momentum of the train, the curious poetry of the moth, the roaring spirit of the fire, all ground down from boulders to sand, and melted into warped, discolored glass. I know what I want. But it is so far away. Give me strength, whatever force assigned me this task, to let myself starve and die for something worthless. I’ll need every ounce I can gather. Every friend I can find.

And yet, I see old friends in the faces of strangers, and strangers in the faces of my oldest friends. So tell me, you virtuous souls, who am I to trust? There are the sweet smiles I now know too well to ever bring me comfort again. And look there, more of the laughing faces I see too often to believe in. And fleets of frowning thinkers swagger with disdain, who think too often to feel. And flocks of eyelids clenched in sorrow circle above, lost in the world and in themselves, closing tightly at the first sign of truth or danger: one and the same, on these dark, soft nights.

And so I set out to find that one and the same, and the gusts of wind whipped around my legs and past my ears with cold that was like weights on my weak frame and wheels on my clumsy, promiscuous mind. I found myself within a house of tarp and scaffolding. I listened for a while as the wind beat at the windows and bent the walls of my staggering castle. The framework creaked in protest. I was alone in this house of horrors for a long time. The spirits of the place toyed with my senses and my memories. I can’t blame them. After all, that is also my occupation.

So I stood inside for bit longer, taking lessons from professionals. But I couldn’t stay too long. There was something else waiting.

There still is something else waiting.

It’s growing, I think. The tempest is building up above. It can’t be held back any more. It waits. It waits for a perfection of moment. And some day soon the heavens will open, and right where the first drop meets the stream: that is where I will be. The force will grow and the banks will burst and maybe, if the way is made ready by the rusty shovel of a lonely creature, the water will twist in a new direction and make its way to a new place by a new path. It will reach and strain and fan out and perhaps one tiny strand, against every dirge of friction this world has to offer, will find its way to the sea. It will be my estuary. And if it has been crafted in just such a way, it will carry me out into the ocean with a solemn, earthy rhythm; the sigh of a mountain.