10-17

The door is closed, capturing body heat and the pervasive odor of weed which strikes me as we step back inside and discretely - as discrete as we can be, walking through the center of a small room - make our way back to the table.

There's a strange tenseness in the room, a tight sense of connectivity that I rarely find. It's an interwoven intensity, people knitted together, healing like shattered tendons and bone, sending out hard calcified spurs to draw their pieces together.

I cannot see the speakers well from my angle, but I can see the room, and I am always more interested in watching the room anyway. Tables are full, the bar is full and everyone along the rail sits in the same half-turned position, elbows akimbo awkwardly behind them. From my location they appear almost interlocked. Vertebrae in a spine colored with plaid flannel, bowties, and flesh.

Some of them nod when the speaker unleashes their strongest words, some clap, some snap, and I feel a little silly, like I am sitting in on a scene that is not for me. I've stumbled into the 1960's and I am not socially responsible enough to join, not passionate enough, not loud enough, not creative enough, not unsure enough, or too sure, maybe.

But these strangers who sit at the same angle, their very bodies speak of connection, and I know I am not unwelcome with my cotton candy hair and quiet observations, because these are people who, in every piece of themselves from their skeleton to their tongue, want to connect to others. It's a vibrant room of grasping connection.

They give and take with words, with snaps and head nods, and their bodies encourage and support, fall quiet when words are strong, fall quiet when words are weak, and I feel their silent respect for the weak words because there's something to appreciate in anyone who stands before a room and drops words from their mouth that pull you into their mind. Neurons are flaring all around me, flashes of information transfer. He is sad. She is sad. She is angry. He is angry.

We sit and absorb the chemicals around us, taking in these strangers and becoming them. I become them and, strangely, I feel an urge to give them some of myself in return. I wonder if that's selfish, to hear their words and to want to return with my own. It's interruption, it's my overexcitement, it's a lesson I'm still learning - when to not speak.

But we are oozing into one another, and I feel that my voice might be welcomed. Appreciated for its own quiet strength. Me too, we say. We are all hurt, we have all been touched or hit or leered at or broken with words and now we take our own words and we rebuild ourselves. We are cells in a body that smells like marijuana and onion rings and unwashed hair. We are a teeming hive of organisms, a biome of sadness and suffering and rage that charges the air around us as our silent electric signals chase from one to another and we forget whose suffering is whose and whose anger is whose because we are all sad, we are all angry, we are all fighting the same fight.

The woman behind the bar has a beautiful face, thick thighs and dreadlocks, unassuming blondes with curled hair, there are men wandering who look homeless with their long beards but stand behind the microphone and capture the crowd, there are thin girls in lace dresses and dark-skinned men with newsboy caps and glasses, then there is me with my cotton-candy unicorn hair. We are all the same person. We are pulsing and surging as one and I forget to feel autonomous as I get swept up in the flow.