Throbbing, thick and encompassing throbbing. If I want, I can close my eyes and the pounding bodies around me will keep me from falling. They sway back and forth to the melody erupting from the stage. I close my eyes. I shut them against the cigarette smoke of the club, against the sweat permeating every thread of my shirt, against every glowing set of white teeth and pierced limbs enraptured in ecstatic fervor. After all, it was the music that I loved, and it was because of the music that I went. Behind the blackness of my eyelids, the notes were sublime and wrought energy from every nerve ending in my body. Despite the fatigue in my legs and the incessant throbbing of the crowd, I was home.
Music has never left me. It was the center of my life, the metronome to which I two-stepped. So quick was music to entice me into yelling along with it, that it often left me embarrassed when my mother would catch me lip-synching in the bathroom mirror.
But as eager as music was to tease me, it was even more willing to welcome me with both comfort and care. Music never left me. It didn't disappear when my parents fought, it was waiting for me when I came home from school, it was the first to wake me up in the morning and feed my starving ears. It became the tone that gave life and definition to my days.
And it grew with me. Like my school friends, my music matured and began to take shape. Together, we underwent a metamorphosis. Each new shape added another facet to my melodic pallet, widening my eclectic musical appetite. Recently, music has become my comrade in arms and somehow infiltrated my closet. I realized one...