Finding the Pure Note

Neon Bubbles Fall Before My Eyes

Neon bubbles fall before my eyes and I feel the pulsing music course through my body. Lights flash: green, red, purple, amber, gold, blue like the sky. Perhaps not the sky. An artificial blue, but a nice one. Like lapis lazuli that glowed. There's a wrongness to it all though, like they aren't quite there, despite the fact I see them now. It's like... It's like these drifting bubbles and strobe lights are meaningless eye candy, and the music isn't really music. Just noise.

Beneath the bubbles, the lights and the kaleidoscope of insanity, arms stretch and wave, figures cast as silhouettes, a contrast of black to the vibrant hues swallowing us whole. These people move slow, yet hair bounces in the air in time with the pounding, the beats that aren't quite beats. Again, this all feels weird, like something... right is missing. Even so, I know I am one with the crowd, moving to the music with these people. My people. We are free, flying along notes of pure ecstasy. The good kind that is. Though I'm sure there was real ecstasy going around. This was a nightclub and I'd expect nothing less.

I close my eyes, letting the colours, the hum of music and the rainbow of lights envelop me, and I dance with the crowd. Silhouettes reveal no faces, only forms. Two girls collapse into the chairs opposite me, around my age and living it up. A guy, looks like Sean, throws his body about with no care, and I laugh. I don't register that something is still wrong. I mean, I closed my eyes, right, so how can I see anything, let alone my dancing companions?

I let it slide and feel my feet carry my actions. Even so, something else is wrong. I am dancing, on a stage, and I can't work out why I'm separated from the crowd. Then it hits me, rolling over me like drugs speeding through my veins.

I am the entertainment. The life of this party. I am not just a figure in the crowd. No, I can offer so much more than just blending in and dancing. I have a talent to show to the world, if only they will listen. I call out to them, begging them to hear me. No, not begging. Commanding.

"Hear me!" I cry, laughing then, a laughter that echoes through the room, echoes into nothingness, and that nothingness settles in my bones. Laughter carrying on as if I'm drunk. In a way, I suppose I am. Drunk with the colours, the vibrancy in the air around me. Life, 

seeping 

from others, into 

me.

"This one's for all of you," I whisper into the microphone. I don't know when it got there, but like I give a shit at this point.

I breathe in, ready to release the notes that will carry the crowd. My notes. They are by no means perfect, but tonight they'll get damn well close enough.

They say in dreams that time flashes forward, whole instances blurred, squashed, swept aside. I guess it was like that, because one second I was ready to sing, and now I was sitting on a large sofa, shaped like blobs of a lava jar erupted from its confines and merged together. There were girls on both sides, and other shapes—who or what they were didn't matter. They were cast under the filters of the colour spectrum, tinging their dark exteriors with splashes and tattoos of energy. They laughed at some joke I had told, but no sound escaped their lips. I just laughed a soundless imitation.

I'm thinking maybe I had too much to drink, but I'm in all honesty high off my face. I know that slip from reality, like the world is vibrant energy, humming through you. The outer edges of my vision were fading, falling away into nothingness. Like the colour was being sucked out.

"Clay," a voice calls to my right. Indistinct. I look that way, and instead of the girl seated there before, now there are four.

"Clay, can I get your number?" to my left this time. The crowd swells, pulsing and throbbing with the music. It's a funny sight, to say the least. I just laugh, my laughter echoing and fading all at once.