curls raze you're one of those good souls i never spent much time orbiting around. i only got close enough to sense a bit of the magic swirling around inside of you. back when you were still tara and not yet theodore, you came to what was probably the last meaningful live gig i'll ever play. i didn't know what to do for an encore. so i improvised. liam and dan held down the low end. i comped and floated around in e-flat minor. my fingers were as tired as my mind felt by then. i started talking to pick up the slack. an invented story about a meet_cute gone wrong somehow turned into a sparring session with my own brain. i touched on the breakup album i'd just made and the typo in the lyric booklet that burned my ass. rapped about resilience and the loss of what looked like love until the pancake makeup washed off. critiqued my own vocal inflections and the unwanted encroachment of empty syntax. halfway through, i was sure i'd lost the audience. they didn't show up to hear an almost uncomfortably personal twelve-minute monologue set to music. while i was staring at the piano keys, the only movement i could make out in those grey garden chairs came from the wild waves of your red hair bobbing and weaving. i couldn't hear you laughing. but i could see you were still with me. and that gave me the courage to look up and learn everyone else was still there too. 230529 what's it to you? who go blather from