Feeling: restless
Listening to: Blue October - Balance Beam
Reading/Watching: Scrubs

Tonight is the type of night which I used to spend hiding, cloistered in a practice room, in the basement of Treadaway Hall.

Sometimes I was truly antisocial, and chose the room which was the longest walk from the door, thus guaranteeing that no one would have the excess energy to follow their curiosity along my trail of late-night notes. I did not want some curious acquaintance to poke his/her head in and chirp, "Whatcha doin'?" I did not want anyone listening to me at all, because I knew how horrible it sounded, and I did not want to talk about it.

Other nights, I was the princess in a not-so-lofty tower. I chose the large room right in the center, despite the fact that the large black grand in that whitewashed, horrifically-echoing room was perpetually out of tune, because the room was in the center of everything, and I could be bold and brash, and pretend to be quite alone, in those whitewashed walls, while I howled and the room shouted back, and all the while I was my ten-year-old self, singing The Sound of Music in my backyard and fearing(hoping) that one of the neighbors might hear. But even in that large room in the center, only the dearest friend with the biggest set of cajones would ever dare to walk in and say "What the fuck, Katie?"

I sang loudly, I played even louder, then faster, until my fingers couldn't keep up and I would merely punish the keys, because I needed to blame something for the odd way I couldn't think straight. At times, I gave up on the piano entirely, because my hands were too stupid, and punished my own vocal cords with repetitions of the most soaring, vicious, draining arias, art songs, modern monstrosities that prefer skill over beauty, and finally, all the stomping, screaming rock songs I knew.

And at the end, I would be exhausted. I would be aching, because my hands and my feet and my throat had taken the brunt of my frustration. Even my skull would be throbbing at times, because the constant pressure of elevated breath and vocal focus like an inverse vise inside my resonators would make the tissues ring and ring and ring. Exhausted, sore, but relieved. Drained.

Now, I don't have a basement. It would be foolish to drive all the way back to campus, because the streets are wet and cold, for starters, and because I am no longer a resident, nor a student, and thus not permitted to enter the practice rooms after 5 p.m.

And with the only musical outlet at my disposal being a new shiny silver keyboard that I was loath to abuse, in a comparatively small apartment flanked by sleeping neighbors, my usual howling and crashing was just not a possibility.

I drove, and I sang, and I got out in a parking lot, and I sang, and I got back in my car, and I drove and sang, and arrived at the gym and completed the siphoning process with a feverish forty-five minutes on an elliptical machine, thinking my same arias so hard that the ridiculous gym music faded away, and you'd think I was actually singing, it felt so clear in my head.

Now I'm home, and my legs are about to fall off at the mere thought of climbing any more stairs, but my voice is still tamped in, insisting that we haven't howled enough yet, because she can still feel the tickle down deep, in the back corner. The "mean reds" are still talking.

I've been called a high-energy person, and never quite understood it (I am far too fond of my sofa), until nights like these, when my muscles cannot carry me any further, but there is my brain, my voice, my fingers on a different keyboard, still clicking, clicking, clicking along. A million thoughts to go.

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