A rehearsal. At the studio. In person - four of us in the room, the core band, getting ready to unleash an acoustic set at the Mountville Folk Festival in just two weeks. I don't have words, and I don't have pictures, but damn - this feels illicit and dangerous like opium or something in my veins - a bliss beyond description. Playing guitar, and bass and percussion, and singing. Like we used to.
But not like we used to. Because we're all different now, you know? The part of us that always was has been sharpened and shaped by the part of each of us we had to get to know over the last 15 months, when we made do and did without, and stayed home and stayed alone even as we zoomed and facetimed and faceplanted from the same damn quarantine thing day after day after. That new part that was our inseparable isolation companion, the one thing we couldn't shake, the parts of ourselves that reacted in ways good and bad to situations over which we had no control. Zoom face, mirror face, let me out of here face.
That new part of me is the lens to look at what we always had, and say, my God I missed you. To look at the friends in the room, and look them in the eye and say how much I've missed you, and ached and hurt with longing for this thing we're doing together where we make art out of imagination and energy and wood and strings. And to sing together. Harmony after 15 long months of flying nowhere solo.
Damn straight I'm feeling rich tonight, like I won a hundred lotteries and gave it all away and feel even richer with the nothing that's left, because we made music together tonight. Laughing like fools, playing like uncaged birds set suddenly free, and yeah, singing.