Lost in Space

This beautiful girl is glaring at me witheringly over a 40 of Steel Reserve, her eyes completely empty. She turns away to talk to her friends. "Let's go find the hot guys at this party. It's gonna be hard."

Five minutes later,

"Let's go to Jake's! LET'S GO TO JAAAAKE'S!!!" (a gay bar downtown)

Yes, please go to Jake's.

It's farts in the dark, the little rejections that lump up in the arteries. Repugnant but ephemeral, passing.

Then they are redeemed by moments like Steel Reserve's friends, who are nice, having a minor argument interrupted by a dreadlocked guy wearing a parka doing a magic little pixie dance.

"What the fuck are you doing, hippie? Get the fuck out of here, man."

But he keeps dancing anyway and eventually blisses off somewhere else of his own accord.

My house is full of strangers. Requests for the wandering band of Woody Guthrie junior folk musicians in my living room to put down their tambourines long enough for people to dance to an Outkast song or two are met with more absent, withering glares. A guy from my class, gone, is talking about how much he loves Hitler. A couple is making out in my garage while a girl takes pictures of them.

Then I think about the handful of times in my life I have held the same feeling in my heart as someone else, simultaneously.

It's all farts in the dark. A gaseous nebula lingering in space, dotted every million light years or so with a few bits of dense matter and a whole lot of fire. Marbles jangle loosely in the belly's expanse.

Then you get loose and send them hurtling towards collision. Which often destroys things, but sometimes makes bright new constellations to guide you, out in the salty tumult.

Klink.