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Dave stands at the mic, hands almost reaching to grip it but at the last second remembering to hold onto the handles of his forearm crutches. His feet hurt, but he wants this, so he’s chosen them over the chair he’s also come to love. They do a little to ease the pain.
“Three in the morning, making love,” he begins, and his feet shift from side to side, arms doing their best to keep up with them so he doesn’t fall arse over teakettle over an errant crutch.
Soon enough, it’s not enough to move from side to side. The song has him in the grips of its longing, of his remembered longing.
“It tears through my head, does it haunt you too?” Dave sings and begins to cover the length of the stage.
The microphone in the stand can’t pick him up like this but the one he’s wearing can. He doesn’t really think about it much, absorbed in the memories and the music.
Dave slides and glides and steps, feet a little off kilter but still somehow balancing as he does. At one point, he dances on his tiptoes. That’s always been the way he dances, but it also relieves his heels of a little of the pain. Dave has to remember to do it more often. He does a fun little shuffle, just managing to stop himself before skittering off the stage, and then dashes back to the center.
It’s liberating to be able to move about, but Dave needs more. He needs to be able to climb, to stand on a precipice for real, to dance on the edge of it and know, with certainty that very well may be hubris, that he won’t fall.
He spots a divider at the edge of the stage. It separates the band from the crowd, a ways up in the air from the stage. It’s perfect.
“It gets into your head like a cosmic zoom,” Dave’s voice rises with him as he tosses one of his crutches onto the divider and then climbs onto it himself, barely balancing on the thing.
He can barely sense the hands of one of the venue staff gripping his belt loops, keeping him in place as he dances, crutches clicking along the dividers, arms sliding forward with them, secure in the cuffs.
Dave rises to his tip toes and falls back onto the balls of his feet, voice carrying as he stares directly into the crowd, as though a barrier has been broken. It only reforms itself before him when he finally climbs down, hands releasing him, and his crutches click on the stage all the way to the back and then forwards again to the microphone with his dancing.
The song carries him through as he expresses himself in his movement as much as its words. Dave has been singing it for years now, but he has not lost the raw edges of it, the pain that moves his heart and body, the pieces of him that are still young and so in love. But there is a part of him that is a creature too, that remembers the good of it, that can find the cracks where the light shines through and dance in their glittering liminality. He is only still, leaning heavily forward on his crutches, long after the last echoes of heaven have vanished into thin air.