Nervous. Boot heels click clack up steps. Walk around back.
Step in. People in pockets everywhere. Swerve straight to cooler.
Take a beer. Cracks open with crisp click. Drink drink drink. Ellipse of friends block out world.
Finish beer. Talking a little louder now. Confidence enough to walk to cooler
alone and grab more beers. See Steph and stop to chat. Move on. Keep on drinking the whole way back.
Two and a half beers and I’m starting to feel it. The excitement, the loosening of social limits. The loosening of myself. Boy whose name starts with a “C” but I just can’t remember starts talking to us. He’s kind of cute.
My fourth beer drains down my throat and I’m laughing at a joke. I’m friendly, people are friendly. The world is all kindness.
My sixth(and three fourths) beer in my hand, my head starts to droop and my hips are swaying of their own accord. It’s like the sky has puppet strings, twisting me side to side. The beat controls me, the world whispers my movements. Who whispers to the earth is beyond me.
…am I on my seventh or my eighth beer? People walk off to dark corners, hands on hips and ******* and chests. Still I dance somewhere in the vast dim basement. Still I twirl, rhythm gone but gravity still clinging to the movements.
But where am I? What am I doing here on this dance floor, on this city-planet floating or falling or patiently waiting on the ice-slicked footsteps of space? The world is spinning as it pirouettes around the sun, the sun circling a superstar, that star swirling around the center of the galaxy, spinning like a top in the rest of the full dark silk of space, stars clapping and nebula soaring and supernovas shattering, guests all to the raves of light years. I dance on earth’s doormat drunk and spinning, feeling a giant in my world and a broken bottle in the worlds of others. Oh god, in the words of that song that’s beating in the bones of the earth and the air in my lungs, can we get much higher?