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by Gregory Allen Cuddey The girl with the black dress backs into your belt area, the contact vaguely recognizable before she steps forward again. You don’t know what it is she wants: she looks back, but only slightly. She continues to dance in the same spot; you are three or four feet behind her. Her perfume has that sugarcoating scent to it: watermelon or strawberry. She looks back again, this time more noticeably at you. Upon her glance, your immediate reaction is to smile with your eyes fixed on hers—except your lips remain closed, and your face is turned so that only the edge of your sight can see her. If only it were in a dream: meeting a beautiful woman in a random place—never asking yourself how you got there—where everything happens so naturally, as if it were meant to happen: a man reveals to a woman his white pearly teeth: no questions asked, no constraints, no anxieties, no awkward moments of silence, just the thought—the amount of light weight in it, the way it holds in its bursting throb of vicissitude, like wet paint caramelized and enameled, the reflected melodic glare it has on its master—is incredible. You came for the music: your wish was to dance in the breath of it; to swim in it; to melt your entire existence in it. Instead, you bash the Tom-Collins glass that encapsulates your body, swinging your right arm as you react to the slow asphyxiation of the crystal's fading clarity. It looks like a fist-pump. It’s not just you who does this. The passersby come in different styles: some have fabricated hair colors; some despise any sort of fabrication; some appear to maybe have mistaken this place for an abandoned warehouse that worships heavy death-metal. What you find odd and comforting at the same time are the number of facial-expressions on the multitude of brands of heads: Muddled, twisted, crestfallen, reclusive, and pressurized rage—it’s all here. To your right, along the bar, a guy, aware of the quick side-glances the girl nearby is giving him, attaches the left side of his hip to the cold metal of the counter. It isn’t long before she comes over to him. Small-talk commences: first it’s a smile, followed by a laugh; as the guy’s fingers whisper the sound of touch across the microscopic ridges of the girl’s skin—up her shoulder, down her arm—a languorous concupiscence wraps itself brightly around her svelte body, squeezing her plum-red, until it’s gravity—gravity alone: the fall into his fabric, the opened-mouth kiss, at which moment he takes full control, and she, in passive-glory mode—from the longevity and ebullience of the pleasure—with no regrets, no strings attached, lets the guy decide everything upon how the night unfolds. The techno music returns to a repetitive series of thumps, where, even in a tight squeeze of ear-damaging volume ricocheting like a bouncy-ball in endless zigzags, even as the wooden floor rumbles no matter where you stand, the mundane predictability of the constant beat still finds a way to soothe you into a drift of random thoughts and memories, the memories generated without the slightest bit of control, without the slightest bit or warning or foreboding cry; you’re here until—through the strobe light’s effect of thickening your body and slowing down the full motion of time—the whirlpool of your mind drifts you so comfortably, not looking back, not looking forward, just inward—just within: You’re making love to a girl, a girl you once knew, a girl you were once very intimate with, with whom you just had enough one day, saying that it wasn’t her, explaining that it was completely you, that you always end up sensing it’s not good enough, no matter who it is, that the connection being transitory, that the connection being severed—was inevitable. Because, even though you’re sometimes animated, full of energy, alive, your world unpredictably loses its colors, and everyone around you immediately turns dead, indifferent, and meaningless, causing you to rush home, causing you to flee up the echoless staircase, locking yourself in your room, engrossed in deep contemplation, wondering whether it’s possible to even love or be friends with someone as you become drowned in an overanalyzing, over-intellectualizing, vacillatingly fastidious, doubtful paralysis of—uncertainty: at the pleading mercy of the fear of failure. You’re in bed with her—naked, free of obscurity, free of distraction. Your hands are moist and gentle, your left hand supporting the middle of her back, the right one acquainting with her hair. Her hair is long and blond and requires a careful touch, the way a cat consents to patience and fragility. Her voice is soft and absorbing, her eyes glistening into a denim fuzzy grey. She gazes into the lightyears of your pupils until she stumbles upon a younger you, a version of you that goes back to the tailend of puberty: The time you started liking girls but never told them you actually liked them, and during every school dance you always had your head down because it would be that girl, whom you admired so much, dancing with another guy; and when there was another girl who wanted to dance with you, you just kept your eyesight on the cracks in the floor finding it too agonizing to cough out the single syllable of acknowledgment. The many times of jumping off the high-dive and not feeling scared, of singing on stage and being the vedette in front of an enormous crowd, of standing on top of the world’s tallest mountain, of throwing lightning bolts down from the mountain on those phonies whom you despised the most—the one time your 9th grade World Literature teacher, a middle-aged man with a ponytail and oddball specs, who had to wrap a bandana around his forehead everyday prior to class because of major sweat-issues, brought you back from your nearly inextricable trances by dropping a large intimidating unabridged Oxford English dictionary down on the floor, and as you jolted off the seat from the heavy thump noise, you stared paralyzed and glued to the magnitude of the teacher’s presence, watching him slowly raise his right hand until it was pointed to the top of the room’s front wall, which hung a banner of a quote by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the teacher reciting the quote word-for-word, as if nothing else was more important to him (the teacher) than the hope of you one day reciting these words yourself and believing in them and gliding through them, almost the way a seagull glides closer and closer to the ocean’s surface: “Admiration for a quality of an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.” So that it doesn’t recede into boredom, so that for once you can actually hold onto the meaning, so that you no longer have to be disappointed, so that you will never think that it could always be better with someone else, so that you never have to feel lonely even though you’re really not alone, so that the beat of the song that got you to this point, that got your smile to be so wide, doesn’t ever have to fade out, doesn’t ever have to sink into the silence of the void. It’s happening. The glaze in her eyes free of any blemishes, free of any smears, absorbing the lightyears of your internal rays: oh, how euphoric the melody is, how wonderful the tenderness becomes, holding back the release, as she’s locked into the murky iris-depths of your deep-sea of green, oh, how beautiful it all feels, holding back the release, never to pull-back, never to push-forward, never to finish, never to revisit, as the paint fades out of liquid youth, as you flake and crisp, as the tempo builds to its climax, as the butterflies shoot rockets up and down your flesh, holding back the release, as the strobes immobilize your body and soul—it’s….ha…..pp…….e…….n………… Copyright 2021. All rights reserved.
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