Dress

I am always surprised when people describe me as peaceful or calm; the child who got her head stuck under the bed in a fit of rage (who stomped and punched and yelled, and passed out because she cried so hard she couldn't breathe) is still camped out inside me.

Maybe music isn't like this for everyone-- maybe our souls are tuned to different bandwidths-- but there are songs that unleash that child: feral emotions slink around the corners of my ribcage, dart to my stomach, and prepare to attack. With this music singing  through my veins I become intoxicated with the ferocity, the jubilance and anguish of this present moment, an exhilaration that is my gut reaction to the best of all music.

I imagine this might be what a skydiver feels as s/he hurtles towards the ground, a ripcord away from death.

Maybe this is what I was after on the basketball court all those years ago, throwing elbows and pitting myself against 6'-something giants I had no business guarding. 

Memorized lines from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" rise-up, ecstatic, 

I celebrate myself, and sing myself!

...I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,

Nature without check with original energy!

(Exclamations are my own)

I give you now a song that fills me with original energy, drum beats and bow-sawing-across-cello-strings that move my dancing feet across the floor, vocals that evoke the narrator's precarious control over her life, and a rare PJ Harvey guitar solo.