That was ten years ago. The sound that was echoing in his head right now, it was from then. It was a Counting Crows concert, before they were as big as they were now. It was a dark club in which they were playing. He was in town on a temproray assignment, to troubleshoot a piece of intractable code. His mind was numb from staring at the screen. It was that period of time when he had left the university again and was working with a monastic fervor to stop darkness from seeping in. Music was the last barrier, the thin boundary where life could be still heard beating against this onslaught.

He remebered staring at this fairly tall woman. She had a very short hair, she was a dyke perhaps, she had a bandana wrapped around her hand and was with another woman. Both of them once had pink hair, he could remeber that. The dye had washed out of the hair, still remainingin traces close to the scalp. He wouldn't have noticed her. Usually he didn't go to concerts for people spotting. "To get washed in a washing machine of sound", that's what he used to say to his colleuges who thought his fervor for music to be a little strange.

But he noticed her as she was whistling, just like a man and the way she smiled was inconsistent with her sad eyes. He was struck by this moment of beauty. A guitar riff had just ended, it was played dazzlingly fast, it was beautiful. And she whistled again. People started moving around and he was standing next to her. He could smell cigeratte smoke. Malboros. And again that full pitch whistle, that he could never be able to do with his rather thick tongue. He stood there staring at her. Maybe she had noticed him before and now she knew he was staring at her. She moved a little to the side away from him but in the process turned her head and smiled at him, waving a fist in the air.

Behind his thick glasses and dark circles under his eyes he could feel loneliness moving in waves, he wanted to touch her skin, her face with the tips of his fingers. It was more than two months when he had last picked up that woman in a San Fransisco bar. That wasn't too difficult. Not as difficult he imagined it would have been some years before. People came their to loose themselves, their small sorrows and their small lives in those places. He doesn't remeber anything about this woman except that she had a birthmark on the side of her waist shaped like a Texan square.

He remebers smiling back thinking that he saw that or something like that elsewhere, before. Then gears of memory click into place and the web because taut with a single word, Varsha. She noticed that sadness in his eyes and maybe because she knew this language very intimately, she started talking to him in the lull between the reprise. She said her name was Tracy and introduced her partner as Maria who waved at him.