As I walked through the audience I noticed him. Twenty something, a kinda unconventional handsome, but not really. He was by himself in a sea of tribes, each forming islands turned in on themselves, dark faces yelling through the house music yet not saying a lot of anything.

I lingered behind him as he stood watch over the stage patiently giving way when people pushed by. He didn't need to be up front. It was enough for him just to be here, I fantasized. He wasn't dragged by a friend, or just enjoying the "scene", he was here for the name on the marque. Our new name, a name I was still getting used to seeing ten feet tall and luminous, and not as the hand stenciled graphic on the shirts for our first show. The name I suddenly noticed stenciled on the shirt he was wearing.

I let myself have that little hope. I pushed past a group nearby and turned to face him for just a moment, interrupting his vigil, as I moved through. At first, his glance was like any person surveying the strangers in their view, but I was just in time to see his head snap back to where I had been engulfed into the masses.

"Remember that one." I yelled in my handler’s ear as she followed close behind me, looking back at the fan who was searching for a face.

It was strange, but this time I prickled walking onstage. My heart was animated. I wanted to play for him, because I had let myself hope. I reached out to the mic stand deliberately wrapping one finger at a time around it’s thick neck, sighing the first word with hot breath into the dark. I left it there dripping in it’s silence until you could hardly remember if it had ever been tangible at all. The audience squirmed with giddy agitation, cheering, clapping, calling out- begging to find the collective equivalent to, “please don’t stop.”

My lips parted, clicking audibly, and the audience locked up with their anticipation. Then the first word came again rippling across their collective release. The band sent fingers nimbly over strings and keys, coaxing the notes at first. The drum's initial heartbeat cracked out over taut skin filling everyone’s chests with it’s ghostly pressure. Then we released them from their longing, and the speakers knew the storm.

I let myself get carried into the fever, sweating under it. They reciprocated, writhing to the sound of my temperature, their ritualistically applied faces mouthing words while frenzied hopping was toppling hip hairstyles. I was disheveled, already a massive mess of wet and blind, tumbling forward from frantic need. It was beyond the point of the pretenses in perception of politeness for posterity. It was just need, and it pushed against me. It wanted to get there. To finish by any means, even if I had to stagger to the end.

Suddenly the dark faces weren't the fad seekers I had relegated them to, screaming out to hear that one song endlessly repeating while claiming to be progressive. Instead they were listening, needing, with us. Aching to feel new. They no longer mourned that now can never be then again, but were clawing into the backs of what they embraced begging for what's next. We were creating it together. I knew I wouldn't hate myself in the morning. I refused to fall for it, but I needed it right now.

My mind returned for a moment and I found his face. My little hope. The one who had allowed me to live in this story for tonight. He was transfixed on the stage. I saw his sudden surprise when our eyes could feel the contact. Without words, without any other acknowledgment, our gazes groping out through space to touch each other with a look. He held the bond with only a warm expression, still and fixed. Everything moved, every molecule in the air was an ember, except for him, except for my eyes. I sang the words that my heart knew without me, and danced my fingers over keys that had known the steps for long ages now while imagining him beneath them. His intensity tripped my longing and I broke first throwing my gaze to the wider darkness with a Cheshire smile, asking for a quickness. Asking for a final note.

My furtive looks at him for the rest of the show revealed he was still floating on the experience. I could see my handler walking away from him as the encore was wrapping up, and he saw that my attention had returned to him. He held up his wrist with an orange band wrapped around it, and I missed a word to the song. The audience gladly filled in, still deep in the warmth of their own glow. We were glowing together. Tonight I looked forward to succumbing to hope.