Wine (Part XI)

At a bar, pounding back shot after shot, not out of fear, but out of some strange exuberance. I am here with complete strangers I met on the subway; complete drunken strangers I decided to come with; complete drunk girls who I told "I'm not looking for sex; I'm looking for a story", and it was true. We wander the streets, sampling bars as we go along. We reach a club. In line we meet a hockey player who refuses to smile and a tiny girl my age who, if I remeber correctly, has already gone through her "starter marriage". I am out of my element; there are myriad strobe lights; people are shouting into each other's ears and the higer frequency registers of my hearing are out of commission. I can feel my pants rattle with the bass. It's bot that I categorically refuse to bust a move, it's that I am somehow unable to impress. And here I was being all uninhibited. There are breasts faling out of what look like high-quality straitjackets. One of the drunk girls went around propositioning girls on my behalf: flattering but at the same time so out of my element. So I leave these people who dropped in so quickly, and they drop out quickly: they will talk to strangers tonight; they will dance and drink and make their element wherever they choose to; they will sleep in parks and dozens of other amused urbanites will encounter them and ignore them; others will put forth a minimum of effort to make them comfortable. What to make of them? Let me say they were a trip; I had them "dug", and I was pleased. Let them live in their lives and in this sentence as well.

But I left. I walk streets; for the first time in a while it is quiet in some ungodly hour, and I am unable to put number to my sense of timelessness; my ears are so muted that it sounds like a particularly lush sowfall: quet. But not serene. This quiet is the quiet of escape; the quet of the sidelines; the hush of anticipation, call it what you will. I am not sure what I am anticipating, but it makes my intestines knotted and has probably halved my food intake. Long-term stress hormones. But what long-term stress am I preparing for? The body is wise, but it is terse and it refuses to engage me in conversation, but it is not inscrutable. The evening that begins with self ends with self. I am beginning to learn how to read the pangs. The direction they shoot in is very significant. Like a facial expression.

Consider: "On really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion."