The lights come up. You feel that connection to everyone else, that thin thread, break. Its just you again.\n\nThere isn't anything left in you that hates, nothing in you that hurts. You're loose, you're calm, you're quiet. Peaceful.\n\nYou walk out to the sidewalk, light a cigarette, and lean against the rough brick of the building.\n\nYou stand outside for a time, and watch the crowd leave. You see the performers leave, watch the one in wings take them off and stretch their shoulders. You see the one in the hoof boots slide them off and gingerly prance across the street, laughing and swearing about how their feet hurt so much. Drunken laughter, shrill and cold, rings out further down the street.\n\nYour ears pop, and sounds go back to their normal levels.\n\nYou stub out your cigarette and walk away.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

You're not you anymore. You haven't been for quite some time. You're part of the energy in the room. \n\nYou're yelling the lyrics, you're moving, flailing, screaming, pushing, shoving, feeling, loving, hating, dancing, singing, breathing, blinking, drinking, smoking, hurting, breaking, slamming, crying, swimming, dying, merging, living.\n\n[[You are creation.|silence]]\n\n\n

You open your eyes and take in your surroundings. There are flickering, bare lightbulbs swinging overhead, illuminating the spectacle taking place on stage.\n\nThe singers dance, one arching fabric and wire swans' wings, and the other stamping horse-hoof boots. Underneath the costumes, they are perfect twins, dark eyes reflecting the pale glitter dusted across their cheekbones. There is a recklessness to their movements.\n\n\nYou close your eyes again.\n\n\n[[Inhale. Exahale|remember]].\n\n\n\n

You're acutely aware of someone pushing against you, someone trying to move you back in the crowd. You let them, and feel dozens of other pairs of hands grasp onto your sleeves, and the back of your shirt, moving you effortlessly through the tangle of bodies. \n\nIt feels like you're underwater, caught in seaweed. There is pressure in your ears, and you feel as though you're pushing up from the bottom of a lake, just about to reach the point where you reflexively inhale.\n\n\n[[You feel your heartbeat in your throat|choke.]]

You open your eyes. Everything is muffled, and your vision is blurring. You focus your attention on planting your feet firmly on the ground, widening your stance and bracing against the pressed too close, flailing bodies around you.\n\nThe singers' voices intermingle on a particularly tight harmony, and their bodies seem to follow suit.\n\n[[They've become one horrible, beautiful, being|nothingness.]] \n\n\n\n\n

You stand in front of the stage in a dimly lit club, with swirls of cigarette smoke and dust motes twisting in the air. You close your eyes for a moment to simply feel the pounding of the bass in your sternum, and the swell, the panic, the frenzy of the crowd around you.\n\nInhale. Exhale.\n\nThe two singers' voices wrap around you in a raging storm, carrying you out of your body, and into [[the collective consciousness of the room|diamond]].

GEMINI\n

SUSAN O\n@galaxyofcharms\n\n\n

Everything stops. Frozen looks.\n\nOne singer rears back, sneering, baring their teeth. You can feel the rawness of the throat that final note is being wrung from.\n\n\n[[One last chord bleeds out of the guitars.|who are you now]]\n\n