11.16

The sound of your choir is so beautiful, but I can't separate its sound from your own. I try to hear you in it, even though you practice for hours to blend your voice so subtly and artfully that to my untrained ears the sound is as many aspects of a single voice. Even so.
This song, especially, I love the sound of you. You lift the noise up from an almost imperceptible pianissimo into a swelling grandissimo trumpet blast, the utterance of angels, the utmost volume of your hundred vocal folds, the outspread wings of a sound that takes the shape of an enormous bird as it settles to the shape of the church. Every feeling of the crowd is tuned to a feverish ecstasy by the glory of word and tone. We rise to the edges of our emotional limits, driven onward by the energy ripped from the conductor by your voice, playing back against each other in a reciprocal loop, feedback upon feedback, drawing us into the same rapture. I look at your face and hear your myriad voice lifting bell-like from the up-turned face I know so well and I am full of you in this moment, full to bursting with words and emotion.
But my moment is bittersweet, the taste desirable and overpowering to my sense. As if gifted to me by a cruel future, I know that this mood of glory and light, the meeting of your voice and the raw edge of my consciousness, is too much for my limited knowledge of spirit and void. My grasp on things that cannot be known is feeble and worried and you exceed it so far that I love the you that you have now become. The voice the voice the voice, it coaxes me to further heavens even through I know I will never fly like this again; my wings will melt, beeswax clinging to me as I plummet, ears full of your sound.
You will come to me after the concert is over and open your mouth and I will find the boy I met long ago under entirely typical circumstances, not the mythic creature that, sole object of my desire, I can never have now that I have for a moment met. I know I will be cruel. Please forgive me. I will leap away from you and throw myself to the froth and tumult to find the voice I know you can possess. I will sink beneath the waves of anonymous humanity rather than deal with the face that should be glorious portal to a voice so magnificent as to weep in smiles. I would rather die, solitary, than go without the voice now I have true knowledge of it. I don't mean it to hurt you.
You know I love you, but I love the siren more. Keep the wax and give me rapture.