The centre of our social universe was Dingley. Two of the more socially sophisticated girls had cool parents who let them throw parties and for this particular party I dressed carefully.
“It’s love sickness, sir.” I wanted to respond. “A bad case.”
Ethan told me about/ the time he took Laura on vacation/to Miami after we first broke up
Soon each groom/ walks down a natural aisle/ with his sister & his canine/ to sounds of sincerest acoustic music.
...We weren’t ones for cliché/Unless performed ironically./Weeks drift by,/The comfort of familiar phrases,/Of gestures and faces...
well-stocked op shop—/she sifts thru clothes racks/to find/an alternative/while I scan CD racks
Later, it’s six of us at a workmate’s one-room apartment, watching videos, drinking, talking. He and I sit on the bed, a purring cat between us. Kitty’s tail flicks against my thighs as he strokes one end, I stroke the other, our hands sometimes touching: poor kitty a conduit for the swollen energy between us.
It’s a rhythm one could argue is difficult to not slow dance to and, in the sun and in love, I lifted her hand into mine and we danced together.
Everyone has a playlist of pain, the songs that bring the sometimes forgotten, partly processed pieces of our past to come rushing to the surface, raw, to be felt again.
Where I went to school, boys – men – didn’t dance. Not unless they were full of whisky bluster or beer bravado, anyway, and certainly not the way he was, his lithe body a study in confident, soft, expressive masculinity.