I've been lookin' for an outside fix to make my insides right.
I'm not really quite sure how to articulate the perpetual somersaults my heart, my head, and my stomach have been taking since Aerosmith graced my backyard, Nassau Coliseum, on July 1st--since the split moment Steven Tyler strutted his enticing, 64-year-old ass to my side of the stage, read my shirt ("Marry me, Steven Tyler!"), allowed me to touch him, and proceeded to lavishly portray how he could "have [me], baby!"
This being the fourth time I've seen them, you'd think I know the drill by now--I've had my fix and I know what to expect and that's all, that's that. But it seems that, with every show, they get better and better--louder and bigger and flashier and, still, better, better, better. For a band that's been playing together for over forty years you'd think they'd have mellowed out, hit a medium and stayed there, but it's like they don't know how to stop--to "draw the line," as they might say. (Checkmate, honey, beat you at your own damn game!) It's not enough to dance your ass off and bang out the lyrics to a T and bounce around, screaming your head off like fangirl-ism is a dying art--sometimes you're rendered motionless, without voice, without anything at all except raw, utter, incredulous awe and amazement. Jesus, God, when I'm sixty-four I hope I can stand, never mind do half of what each of them does on their own.
And that's just that--being in the same room, hearing the music in its purest, most primal sense, from the source itself is more than enough for me, and it has been since the first time I saw them at sixteen years of age. Imagine my unmatched shock at the sight of my adolescent-childhood hero, the voice that saved me the breath I knew I'd need when I was crawling on cold, basement floor tiles and ripping at my own veins with broken razors, shards of ill-born glass, taking the stage in strides--and right at me! At me! In a sea of thousands that voice found me, and suddenly it didn't matter whether I was sixteen and bleeding or twenty-two and jaded beyond feasible human repair--because, for the first time and for the depth of my memory's undying wherewithal, that voice hushed and heard me. It didn't matter that it saw fit to jive with the dirty pictures in my girlish, nighttime head; it could have dubbed me the scariest, most undeserving sight in the world--but it was mine, then, and it heard me.
There aren't words enough in time or space or life, ever, to express the gratitude that envelopes me every moment, every second of every day, since. There aren't words enough to prove how it will never leave, that gratitude. The tears I've cried, they are not even a fraction, trimmed and microscopic, of the feelings that awash me every time the scene flashes tantalizingly behind forever-changed blue eyes. Were I faced with the opportunity, really, to stand before him and thank him--without the shirt, without the tears, without the girly shrieks that strangle me in dreams come true--I know that I could not, would only stand there, unable to communicate what a moment's worth of paid attention could do to a girl who never had anything but that voice, and the collective voices that built skyward on the same sentiments and secrets. Maybe I wouldn't even want to say thank you because "thank you" is bland, is overused, is just a coupling of underrated words, and most importantly could never portray the lives saved.
Those voices, you know, have no idea. Maybe they had voices once, too, long, long ago, but then they became them and they live and they breathe and they forget, though we never will. I never will.
My voice, ladies and gentlemen. My long-lost heart, my hero, my revived lust for living. The man who simultaneously changed my life and saved it--more than once, twice, thrice. The reason tomorrow seems so beautifully close. My dream come true.
And this, the patchwork quilt of newfound love and life, the ever-attentive listener-turned-speaker. Now I'll never shut up.