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[edge-is-strong.livejournal.com]

Title: Reckoning and Revelling
Fandom: Ani DiFranco
Rating: PG or PG-13 for swearing and f/f relationships.
Summary: A whole life in the details of one day.
Notes: This is set back around 1995, when it was just Ani and her drummer who toured.
X-posted anywhere that would take it.

The light bends uncomfortably from between the blinds in shafts, coloring Ani’s face with alternating stripes of black and white as she turns in her fitful sleep. She loves this business of sleeping in, twisting herself into the sheets, the crisp off-white linen this hotel prefers brushing across her naked skin and her hair wild around her face. One tanned foot stretches out, off the side of the bed, all long thin toes and cracking orange polish on the nails.

She painted them in a fit of girly-ness last week; when finally the pictures of herself in shaved hair and combat boots and the echo of Leslie calling her a butch had gone though her head one too many times and she felt the need to do something, anything, feminine. She doesn’t understand why this thing called gender is so important, anyways; it seems rather irrelevant in the scheme of things, but everyone around her keeps focusing on their old-fashioned notions of you can’t and women don’t. Well women don’t fall in love with other women, either, but that’s a taboo she broke a long time ago.

Andy murmurs in the bed across the room, rolling and talking to himself in moves that Ani really only registers in some vague part of her subconscious, maybe to be dredged up five years from now in a song. She plays a game with herself sometimes when she is bored or tired or feeling hopeless where she makes everything that happens to her into a song lyrics. She smiles to herself in her sleepy haze at the thought, trying to imagine what kind of lyric could come from this moment; maybe something along the lines of ‘the morning is fitful and weary like your sleep in my bed.’ God, that’s horrible. She laughs and stretches, arms above head and toes pointing, the smooth curve of one hip escaping from under the sheet and she makes a resolution to herself never to write until she is fully awake.

Finally she gets up, grabbing random clothes from her suitcase and shutting the bathroom door quietly to avoid disturbing Andy. the water pours out of the faucet in hot, pounding streams and reddens her skin. She tips her head back, letting the water run through her hair and over her face, long-lashed eyes closed tight against the intrusion. Mint fresh body wash and dollar store shampoo cleanse her, make her odourless and ready for the world, and then she gets out, forgoing the traditional towel dry-off in favor of standing in front of the open window with the breeze ghosting across her skin like Kat’s fingers used to do. Now that‘s gotta be a song lyrics. On go the white cotton panties faded jeans too tight righteous babe shirt and she is out the door, key card in her pocket and trusty Doc Martens on her feet.

---

She likes to find a random coffee shop in each town to spend a couple of hours in, people watching. This one is particularly quaint; non-matching tables and little wicker chairs, and the dread-locked girl behind the counter keeps looking at Ani lustfully as she nurses her mug of decaffeinated green tea. She’s not in the mood for a one night thing, hasn’t been in a while, so she simply smiles over the blue porcelain and strikes up a conversation with the green haired socialist at the next table, talking politics for half an hour before making her polite goodbyes and leaving with a number scrawled on her arm in red ink.

The grey-blue sidewalk is cracked and spouting weeds under her feet. She walks with no purpose, hands in pocket head down melody for a new song running through her mind, just a chord progression, really, but she can feel the rest of the song starting to take shape around one line: I am not a pretty girl. She came to this revelation about herself a while ago, before the blue dreads after the nose ring.

A little bell tinkers over the door of the convenience store where she buys a newspaper and a chocolate bar, keep the change. She goes out and sits on the bus stop bench, mapping out the song in the margins of suicide bombings and mainstream music. Little lines and dots form the melody, the symbols for hammer down and palm-mute and let ring flying from her pen and being scratched out just as quickly. Some people find it strange that she can write like this, with no guitar in front of her, but to her it seems natural. Songs don’t come out of my guitar, jackass, she wants to say, they come out of my head and my heart. They come out of stolen kisses and late mornings and the millions of times I’ve been let down.

Sometimes, Ani doesn’t think that anyone understands her. She writes songs like this, thinking that they are touching and universal and accessible, and then wakes up days later with the horrible knowledge that they will be dismissed by most of society with an off-hand silly lesbian. At least Andy understands me, she thinks defiantly; at least Caitlyn Marla Fred Kat Emmett Suzanne Leslie saw something redeemable in me, if only for a time. And if one person understands a lyric and loves it and it rolls around in their mind in that way perfect songs do, it will be like a validation of whatever experience fuelled it’s birth.

Shakes it off, folds the newspaper under her arm and continues back to the hotel to get some lunch.

---

There is a moment of doubt under every spotlight. Sitting on the teetering stool, one foot up supporting the battered acoustic and she smiles and strums a trial chord, a D. D is her favorite chord for when she’s nervous, harmony being the ultimate cure-all. The black mesh wire of the mike is close to her chapped lips and words escape naturally from her mouth, tension melting out of shoulders and into the smoky room. She intro’s the new song, explaining that this is it’s debut, and won’t you please tell her what you thought of it after? Callused fingers bend and press and play like they need to, and her smooth voice escapes in the words she has never aired to another human before, barring Andy this afternoon. His steady perfect drumbeat behind her soothes her nerves a little, and she pauses amid the cheering at the end of the song to say a silent ‘fuck you’ to Jeff, who told her in a fit of rage when they broke up that her songs weren’t that good anyways.

On that note, she decides to sing “Untouchable Face” next. She loves doing this, pouring her heart out in front of people who are perfect strangers and her most intimate friends all in one. She does a poem (really a song with no guitar part yet), takes a sip of water, tunes her guitar. Asks jokingly if anyone in the audience has an extra plectrum and actually is given one.

Afterwards, she hangs out at the bar, getting free drinks from college students and being congratulated on her ‘free spirit’ until she gets sick of the scene and escapes back to the cool sheets wooden bed frame chocolate mint on her pillow at the hotel.

And she thinks to herself, there’s a song in this. I’ve just gotta find it.