The music was loud and the air was cold. And when the stars came out
during the encore we were still dancing.
We were at a concert once. I don’t remember what day it was, but
I remember that she was wearing a light blue t-shirt with one of those
useless breast pockets that had a ketchup stain on it, so it was probably
warm outside. A breeze would come every once in a while. I remember
because she kept pushing the hair out of her face and brushing it behind
her ears. She didn’t have her ears pierced. Whenever the breeze came the
hair on her arms would stand up and she would rub her hands up and
down her biceps and shrug her shoulders up to her ears and stay like that
even after the breeze had disappeared. Maybe it was spring. Early spring.
When you know it’s supposed to be warm and the thought makes you
excited. So excited that you go outside in a light blue, stained t-shirt and
tell yourself that the cold is gone, but really it’s not, not yet. It’s lingering,
just long enough to feel the warmth too. So let’s say it was early spring.
Maybe March.
The concert was long, and we sang into the night until half a moon
came out, reflecting light from the invisible sun and moving the tides
closer, then farther away from us. Orion was directly overhead. I pointed
it out to her. She squinted and looked up, pretending to see. To her they
were something to marvel at, write about, wonder about their complexity.
But to me they were just stars, giant masses of gas burning millions of
light years away, positioned just right so that we could see them, at this
very moment, while that band played that song and she was dancing
around me, looking at the stars and whispering about what they hold.
Nothing, I said. They don’t hold anything. She just danced and shook her
head, already writing a poem that I wouldn’t understand. So I just held
her hand and twirled her around and let her stare and point and write.
She was so high that night that she actually believed she was
swimming among the stars, above the clouds where time doesn’t matter
and gravity has no effect on her. The drugs stayed in her brain for a while,
until they set her down gently on the ground, away from the stars, back
to time and gravity and me. I held her close that night, turning over her
palm, looking into her eyes, trying to see what she sees, but all she saw
were stars.
I turned a few pages, the memories of us happy and outside making
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