I'll always be waiting (for you)
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Summary
There is noise first. There is always noise at these things. Crowd noise, production noise, the low thrum of bass through a floor she has been standing on for three hours. She knows this floor. She's walked every inch of it.
She's on it now, differently.
The sequence of events is difficult to locate from this angle. There was the wing. The credential that was wrong. The man standing where no one with a legitimate pass would stand. There was the glint — metallic and catching the stage light for just a moment, the way things catch light when they're being raised and aimed, and she has been trained to see exactly that and nothing in her hesitated —
Then the floor.
OR
For five years, Mira has kept Rumi safe from a careful professional distance.
The distance ends on the floor of a concert venue with thirty thousand people gone silent around them.
Series
- Part 1 of I'll always be waiting (for you)
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Summary
She is between the third and fourth song. The particular two minutes of a show that belong only to her — no one's eyes on her yet, the stage dark, the crowd in that suspended state of waiting that has its own quality of noise. She knows exactly where Mira is. She does not look. She knows by the architecture of the wing, by the weight of the room, by five years of understanding where Mira stands without needing to confirm it.
Then the sound.
It is brief and specific and she does not know how she knows what it is except that she does, instantly, completely, the way the body sometimes knows things it has not been taught. She turns before she decides to turn.
The wing is wrong.
There is movement where there should not be movement, a figure that does not belong, and then — already, in the time it takes to draw breath — something on the floor. She knows before she sees clearly. She knows from the shape of it, from the way the crew is moving, from the particular stillness at the center of all that motion.
Mira.
OR
Rumi settles onto the hospital couch and refuses to leave.
Series
- Part 2 of I'll always be waiting (for you)
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Summary
She thinks about the next few months. The new album — she is still not used to how it was received, the exuberance of it, the quality of welcome that means people were waiting and she came back and it was worth waiting for. The tour that starts in six weeks. Twelve cities. Twenty-three shows. The first full run since —
She does not finish that sentence. She knows how it ends.
It is different now. She thinks about how different, about what it means to go back to stages and wings and the two minutes between songs that belong only to her — and she looks down at Mira.
The thought arrives the way true things arrive. Not as a revelation. More like something that has been true for a while and is only now saying itself aloud, in the dark, to the moving light on the ceiling.
I want to marry her.
She does not move. She has learned from seven years of this woman how to hold something without disturbing it. She puts the thought where she puts things she is patient about. Then she thinks: I have nothing. No ring. No plan. Nothing prepared. She deserves everything.
The pool light moves across the ceiling. Mira breathes.
Series
- Part 3 of I'll always be waiting (for you)