Hooked

The music grabbed at my soul like a physical force, pushing me this way and that, taking me away from this world. Taking me away from everything but the sensation of bare feet spinning on carpeted floor, the sound of music pumping from my stereo, pumping into my blood. Taking me away from everything but the thoughts. Thoughts that I can barely explain and don't want to understand.

My friends think I like to show of, that I like dance because it's something that I have bragging rights over, that it's a hobby.

My friends are wrong.

The thing that I flaunt is not dance. It's a substitute, no, an expression of dance with carefully choreographed routines and just as carefully followed rules. Dance is more intense and far more dangerous. You can lose yourself in dance like you can in sex or drugs. Dance is a raw power that takes control of you, stripping away all rational thought, leaving only a bundle of nerves ruled by sensation. Other people have lost themselves in things, not always dance. It becomes an obsession, it uses their bodies, forcing out new creations, ideas, masterpieces. All the names that have gone down in history like Einstein and Da Vinci, they lost control, they let themselves in to far, they became fixated by it, and they were consumed by it. They have been remembered through the ages mostly because of their sheer brilliance, but also because of their obsession, the intensity of it.

It's the same as dance.

I won't lose myself.

I refuse to.

There are days when I want to, yearn to let the music enter my soul and keep it there. Days when the world just seems so incredibly fucked up, a realm of chaos run by money and greed. Those are the times I can feel myself inching towards the edge.

Insanity.

That's what awaits me, what awaits thousands of others. Not always immediately though. In fact, after a few months of total, unbounded excess, most people manage to fight their way back to a point of being in which they can resume a façade of a normal lifestyle. Some of them only get halfway; they're the ones who end up on the street. Wandering, crazed, at one moment in this world the next, god knows. But, even if you do return, all the way, it's not the same. One of my dance teachers came back, but his gaze was always dazed. Never completely focused.

He killed himself a few years back.

But before he did, he talked. He told me about losing yourself, how you don't want to eat, drink, sleep or think. You just listen to the music, sway with it, feel it, fuck it. And when I say 'fuck it' I mean as in make love to it, caress it. Need it. The man only brought it up 3 times at the most, but that was enough. I saw sufficient fear and longing in his face to caution me for a lifetime. There were other examples of course. I even talked to a few of them.

The ones on the street.

Mostly they were perfectly sane, even intelligent. And I would find myself wondering why they were on the street at all. Except for the fact that, when they were in their right minds, they never wanted to talk about it. The madness. Whenever I asked they just looked at me helplessly, the same fear and longing evident on their faces. And that's exactly what they were – helpless. One day I saw one of them go over, and in a moment of clarity, all the scraps of knowledge I had had thrown at me clicked. I understood why it was such a terrible yet desirable fate. In the midst of the pleasure, the ecstasy, you loose everything. You loose all sense of identity, you don't know who you. You don't know what you've lost.

Only that you have lost.

Only that you are lost.

One moment the man had been commenting on some graphitti in a bus shelter while everyone, myself included, had been avoiding eye-contact and the next, he had gone rigid. He stayed, tense for a heart beat before relaxing and sort of wondering off. I still don't know why I followed him; maybe it was the blank look on his face. But follow him I did. He never stopped moving, he was slow, but there was a kind of impatience about his actions, a restlessness. And he talked. Mostly just gibberish, unintelligible, but just once he broke away from the random words and mumbles and managed a completely lucid phrase. In a strangely composed voice, cold, hopeless, he said;

Alone again.

Of course, how would I know?

Physically, I could be surrounded by people and

I would have no notion of it. Mentally, or perhaps spiritually,

I am completely isolated, held captive by my

own passion. But then,

aren't we all?

And suddenly he was back, he stared at me for a moment, eyes wide and bloodshot. He smiled, horribly, and tears rolled down his grimy cheeks.

"I'm me," he laughed bitterly "released back into my normal life, my wasted, withering life." He spoke to everything, and to nothing. He didn't acknowledge my presence, nor did I try to speak to him. It was too surreal a circumstance that mundane things such as conversation had no part in it. The man picked up a stick and drew a face in the dirt; one side normal to a point of being boring, the mouth a hard line, wrinkles lined his face and bags shadowed his eyes. The other was smiling, its face was clear, relaxed, light, but the edges of it were falling apart, being eaten away. I was engrossed by the face, how could so simple a picture, drawn in filth with a crude stick, express such emotion? Any emotion? When I finally tore my gaze away, the man, the artist, was gone. Crouched down in some grimy alley, staring at a face drawn in dirt and the city's shit, I decided. I had looked at my options and found that there were no options.

Sane.

No alternative.

I will not succumb. If I go over, I'll stay over and eventually I will starve to death. And death is much better than lingering through the rest of my life as some half-crazed beggar, shuffling through back streets. But I won't give in. I refuse to give in. I'm strong enough, I have a life to live. I'm not going to let an obsession control me. Even as the music pulls at me, I will stand strong. Music could not possibly mean more to me than my life. The beat of the song throbs in time to my pulse. I can resist this.

I lie.

I dance.

The song ends.

I look into a mirror; still here, still sane. I ignore the lingering doubts in my mind that tell me I'm fighting a losing battle. The uncertainties that whisper

How?

How can you escape it?

How can you hide from the madness, the music, when you're already,

irreversibly, irrevocably

hooked?

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

He he, that was a bit, weird, wasn't it? Any who, Maxxie doesn't belong to me (he's gay anyway) but I claim the rest of the characters in this. Please review, it makes poor, depressed, little me so happy.