I went because of a blind double-date. Mel and Mel, my good friends—well, I was good friends with Melody, and Melven went with her, so I became good friends with him—insisted that Melven's cousin Carey would make a good match with me.

So we went to this little cafe with live music. Saturday night, relaxed atmosphere, you know the kind of place.

Carey and I weren't a good match. Doesn't really matter. He's a nice guy, but all four of us at the table could tell it was just wrong. I wish him all the luck.

I decided to stay a bit longer, after the others left. Just wanted to hang out, enjoy the music. The second last act of the night came on. Some local girl, doing folk songs with a punk/metal edge on her. It was my kind of thing. She wrote all her own stuff, some were good, some were... well, nothing was awful, but some were less successful, far as I was concerned.

But then there was that one song.

It didn't have a title yet, according to the singer. Or, rather, what she said was that the song hadn't told her its title yet. That odd phrasing caught my attention, and I don't think I was the only one.

The sound was both similar to the rest of her set, and somehow completely different. It hit me after a few chords, and then the start of the wordless chorus, right in the ribs, like something constraining me, forcing the air from my lungs, locking my eyes and ears on the singer. I had been slouching, casual, and I sat up at attention. The sound just shook me right down to the core. My heart was racing, but my mind was in a strange, calm place, hanging off every note, more even than the words. I couldn't even understand the words. I registered that she was singing in English, sure, she wasn't using a language that I didn't understand, and they were even in an order that made sense, or should have, and it was clear that other people could understand the lyrics, but for whatever reason I had no way to comprehend the words. If you were to read them to me, or give them to me as text, it would be fine, it wasn't the words that were the problem—not that it was a problem, to begin with—but the sound, the music, which was short-circuiting the language-understanding parts of my brain.

I realized that I was staring, and that I was open-mouthed, and that I was drooling. I was in complete and utter awe. There was nothing particularly challenging about the music, as far as I could tell, it didn't seem like the singer was doing anything particularly virtuosic with her voice or her guitar, but still the performance was, very literally, stunning. I wiped my chin as the singer circled back to the wordless chorus, and the band around my midsection tightened. It felt like it was squeezing tears out of me.

I had to leave.

I couldn't, until she was done, but I had to. I couldn't hear anything else after that. The minute she stopped, I rushed to the cashier, I gave her a $20 bill for the only thing I had after Carey had covered my dinner bill (a salted caramel hot chocolate, actual cost $7.78 with tax) and bolted before she could get me change. I didn't care. I needed to be out of there. I needed to be away from people. I needed to be on my own, I needed to be at home, I needed... I didn't know what I needed, but I knew it wasn't there, and I knew that the longer I stayed there, the further I would be from whatever and wherever it was.

I hopped in my car. I drove. Home. I couldn't go anywhere else. The phone tried to connect and start playing music from my favourite playlist, and I damn near chucked the fucking thing out the window (instead I settled for just turning off the speakers). Other music was an intrusion. I needed silence, that much I knew. I needed a space to contemplate what I'd just heard, what had just happened to me, what it all meant, if it meant anything at all.

Is this what a religious experience is like? I asked myself. I had gone to Sunday school for five years and attended church once in a while since then, Christmas, Easter, weddings, funerals, you know the sort, maybe this was God reaching out to me. I didn't have anything else to compare it to, so I settled on that, at least momentarily.

I tried to hold on to something, anything about the performance, as I very nearly ran a red light. What was her name? Fuck, what the fuck was her name? I would have to look it up when I got home, make sure I could track her down, maybe try to recreate the experience. I sped off the line as soon as the light changed, squirming in my seat. I should have gone to the bathroom before I left. I should have written her name down. I should have done a thousand things, but I needed to leave. I couldn't allow anything to diminish the power of what I'd just been a part of.

I just made it. Parked the car, raced up three flights of stairs to my apartment, and got my skirt down just before the bladder insisted on emptying itself. For that moment, at least, I wasn't thinking about the music. I sighed, relaxing, and decided that what I wanted (whether I needed it or not) was a shower. A hot shower. I didn't know whether I was trying to get back into the space that I had been in before, or whether I was trying to cleanse myself of whatever had come over me, but a shower sounded perfect.

I moved with purpose. Sure, it was late, I'd had a long day, but I found a powerful, renewed energy. I stripped. I saw myself in the mirror. I had come to terms with my fuller figure, learned to accept my blemishes and my little scars and marks and lines, the premature grey in my dark hair that had afflicted my mother in her twenties as well, the slightly stiff walk from a football injury (seriously) that wouldn't go away, the breasts that were sagging a bit with age, the weight that came with not being as active as I once was. But when I saw myself in the mirror, there was no need to come to terms with anything. The woman I saw looking back at me was radiant. Gorgeous. It was the same image, and yet somehow not the same. There was a shocking beauty in that mirror that I hadn't seen in... well, ever, in myself. I paused, watching, sure that what I was seeing was an illusion, or maybe I was having a stroke or something, but no, there was the same woman I had always been and yet not the same woman I had always been.

I could feel the rhythm of the music, the underlying pulse of the singer's voice, in my breathing and in my heart and in my whole body. I simply looked at myself, feeling that rhythm. I was part of that rhythm. Part of that song. I shivered, feeling... something. I couldn't put my finger on it. I had never felt it before, that I could remember, and my brain jumped back to the concept of a religious experience.

I wanted the shower I'd promised myself, and I reluctantly tore myself away from the mirror. I ran the water, got in when it was good and hot, and felt that near-scalding water all over my body. It failed to wash away the experience; if anything, it brought further clarity, as if it was washing away everything else but the experience.

I knew I wouldn't be sleeping that night. I don't know how I knew, but I knew. As I got out of the shower and towelled myself off, I could feel that pulse in my whole body telling me that I was awake. Very awake. And that there was a metaphorical dimension to that awakeness. Something had awakened inside me.

I got dressed. I should have either just crashed naked into bed, or at least put myself into pyjamas. Instead I got on a little black dress, something I might wear on a third date, something that nicely showed off those parts of me I liked showing off and covered up those parts I wanted covered. I threw a warm coat over it and a pair of fake-fur-lined boots. It was definitely too cold for that outfit, but apparently I didn't care. My legs were exposed. It was a poor decision.

And it was the perfect decision. I just didn't know why.

I grabbed my purse and went out into the street. I started walking. The night was calm, which probably helped, but despite what I knew the temperature was, I didn't feel the cold at all. I didn't feel cold. I just felt the rhythm, pulling me forward. I didn't even know to where. I was just walking. Walking to the rhythm. Left foot, right foot. Hearing the echoes of the singer's voice in my memory. My phone came out of the purse, into my hand. I looked up the cafe where we'd been, looked up the performer lineup...

Tempest.

I giggled. Tempest in a tea house. It was a coffee shop, of course, but it still made me laugh.

I also looked at the time, and I shouldn't have, and that shocked me out of the rhythm just for a moment. It was very late. I shivered. Goosebumps rose on my bare legs. The slightest breeze made me tremble. I was over a kilometre from home, and while I knew the way back, I didn't want to go back. I wanted to go forward, but that meant finding the rhythm again, because I didn't know which way was forward without that music in my mind.

I took a breath, trying to banish the temperature from my mind, trying to find that tune again. My eyes closed, and I took a step. I shivered, and ignored that I was shivering, and took another.

There it was. The tune pulled at me, almost physically. It nearly hauled me forward, and by the time I reached the end of the block, I had forgotten that I had ever been cold to begin with.

I lived in the music. Occasionally, I turned on my heel in a spin, or took a couple extra steps before doubling back in a bit of a cha-cha maneuvre. The fresh falling snow crunched under my feet like a drum, adding to the music in my body and mind. I could feel that guitar, that wash of sound, guiding my movements. The singer's voice—Tempest's voice—agreed with the guitar, and layered on itself in some sort of masterful composition that was far beyond my three years of juvenile piano lessons.

I was a little surprised when the sun started to come up. I had been walking for hours, but I sure didn't feel the tiredness that I would have expected. The light of the first rays of the sun lit up a particular building in front of me, and I slipped inside as someone else stepped out. I took an elevator to the sixth floor.

I followed the music to a certain door.

For a moment, for just an instant, I hesitated, wondering what the fuck I was doing.

I knocked.

She. The singer. Tempest. Answered the door.

She was obviously tired, maybe I woke her up. She seemed confused, until our eyes met, and suddenly she knew. She knew what her music had done to me.

I walked into the apartment. It was cute, bigger than mine, there was a nice living room with a couple couches, one of which had a guitar on a stand next to it, a few plants here and there, three closed doors off to one side and a kitchen area opposite.

I sank to my knees as Tempest closed the door. I took a breath. "I want to hear that music again," I said. The first words I spoke to her, ever.

She smiled. She sat down on the couch with the guitar nearby. She looked absolutely radiant, with glowing grey eyes, black hair that faded to blue towards its ends, and an almost-waifish punk-rock look. She grabbed the guitar, and honestly, my hands trembled. As the first notes hit, I could feel it in my knees, through the floor, not that the floor was vibrating, the acoustic guitar she was playing didn't have anything near the power of the amplified instrument she had been playing the night before, but I could feel every last note as if the air and the building themselves were carrying the music to my body. My mouth ran dry. I shrugged my coat off. Without that barrier, I could feel the music more. More exposure to the air meant more exposure to the music, and I understood that implicitly, and I stood and slipped off my boots—there was that rhythm in my feet again! I couldn't help but spin and twirl as she started to sing, even if it wasn't that kind of a song. I felt like a child. I felt like laughing. I felt like cheering. I felt like sitting in silent reverence on the floor at Tempest's side. I had found something, something so big, something so much bigger than I was. It was easy, it was nothing at all to drop my dress on the empty couch.

I hadn't put anything on underneath.

I let the music pull me around and around and down to the floor, not just to my knees, but as she finished singing, I collapsed down entirely and put my hands and my forehead on the floor, just breathing, breathing in the moment. Tears, again, rolled from my eyes.

I was awash in the beauty of the moment.

She didn't choose the words. I know she didn't. I know they came from beyond her, from beyond the music itself. "You will be the first."

God, her voice. Even just when she spoke, it was music.

My response, made from the floor, without even lifting my head, came similarly from somewhere past me. "And not the last."

Her hand ran slowly along my back, and sent shivers and twitches through my whole body, making it a challenge to maintain my pose. When she lifted her hand, I sat up tall.

She looked at me, up and down. "Erynn."

"Hm?"

I had never told her my name. She just knew it. I even heard her spell it properly. And none of that mattered. She could have called me anything and I'd've jumped to answer.

"Bring me water."

I didn't even think. I just went to the kitchen. I knew where the glasses were. I knew that there was a jug of cold water in the fridge. I brought Tempest a glass of cold water.

I knelt again as I presented it.

She smiled, taking the glass from me. "Good job, thank you."

It was, for the briefest moment, like that music ran through me again. I shuddered in delight.

I opened eyes I hadn't realized I'd closed. I smiled. I looked at her. She looked at me. She smiled back.

Finally, my mind cleared. I was still smiling. "What the fuck am I doing?" I asked her, genuinely.

She laughed. "Damned if I know," she answered. "But you're doing it. And I'm doing it, too. And I don't know what the fuck I'm doing any more than you do."

I shook my head, feeling giddy. "I should probably go home, get back to my real life, right?"

"Do you wanna?"

"Not for a second."

"Great." Tempest sat up and put the glass on a side table. "Uh. This might be a bit awkward, but I don't think I'm a lesbian."

I shrugged. "Don't think I am either. But here I am. I guess if you want me to be I will be."

"Do you want clothes?"

"Nope. I should be naked. Especially while you're playing." I paused for a moment. "Do you mind it?"

She shook her head. "You look great. And it really marks you as mine." Tempest patted my head, and I almost purred. "You serve me and my roommate."

"I'll do anything. Anything at all. Just to hear that song again."

That should have scared her off. Should have scared anyone off. Hell, it should have scared me off. But there wasn't any fear at all in that room.

The music, the memory of the music echoed through my mind. I had work the next day, if Tempest wanted me to keep working. All of this, everything, felt absolutely ridiculous.

And I loved it.