To me you are absent

A thin veil of netting is pulled back and I am in a different room; it is humming with the chorus of a hundred voices singing recherché at each other. The air is breathing with a language permeating through my youth, my adolescence… my adulthood. Words that pass through my ears, sparking as they travel through my neurons, a smile, a remembrance of; a parley, a pardon. These men here, with their crashing voices filling resonances in between gushes of crystal and generous lip curlings, they remind me of my father.

I am in a haze of moments, my own lips offer up a chance of warmth, but downwards at the tablecloths petalled with white paper. The crumbs flocking sadly beneath the cliffs of the bread plate greedily cling to my fingerprints as I gift them back to the teats of their steaming mother.

I am a part, I am apart.

The tango of the aprons on the backs and fronts and sides of the jesters, of the acrobats, of the variety hour plate turners that swirl pulled white before my very eyes. They come close to my ear and tell me their secrets, like a prime-time-behind-the-scenes documentary, they open their eyes huge and explain in big rounding gestures what I should be delighted with. What I am delighted with… What am I…?

The first thing I taste is burning bright along my tongue a fermentation of flowers, and I wonder how it is that beauty can be trapped and rotted into a delight. It is smooth like late night after-rain-roads and coats my taste buds with a memory of the first time I had a drink with – no – the first time I had not felt like a child in my father’s eyes. Mastiha vapours blurring through my held backs. I do not acquiesce this time.

What I notice is that some times faces can be familiar even if you do not know them, and I understand that some personalities can leave heavier footprints in your mind, for even one meeting, than others can shuffle around in whole life times. How have you been?

Sitting ensconced between bawdy jokes and full stomached laughter I am in another time, where I would crawl under these white dresses, giggling in between the legs of all the people whose cheeks you would kiss, filling your nostrils with heavy scents of bottled bright and burned quick.

I have party friends, I had party friends.

My tongue enjoys the most delicious fixation only if it is what I can remember that makes me feel the moment, justifies its existence as the second coming of the prelude I enjoyed in years decayed. I allow my childhood to swirl around my tongue and I swallow it, hoping my receptors aren’t coated with bitterness this time. Nostalgia has high acidity, high tannins.

I kiss your cheeks; in a dance I grew up with, forgot, and was reminded of again by those who learnt it quick. But what does it mean? These kisses don’t mean a thing, and I could show you people that make it mean more than new found mores. The people that let their love drip onto your skin with a bang, that leave the after glow and scent of fireworks bright along your cheek bones, heavy, make you sick on, queasy with their love.

I can show you what I mean, what I was meaning to.

Every time I come to a place like this, I think I am the same. I am scared that I am, and I am quiet, sometimes in a loud, rushing way, like the crackling in your ears of reeds crushing under your feet, blocking your view, that strident immemorable back ground noise you have to trudge through so you can avoid it. Maybe mosquitoes.

They do not hold the microphones up to their mouths, close enough, so they tunnel in and out of my hearing each time they transfer their weight from shoe to shoe, from five toes to heel. I lean back a little and count all the little half bulbs, half light and half silver darkness. They dangle as if free-falling, but anchored a little from the other next to each, and in series they sway with the apologetic zephyr of people squeezing through too close tables. Am I anchored? Am I free, still?

What I know is that I will find out when I step on shores you have not walked across for years longer than my life, and what I know is that you will not be there when I will become a. If I become a. And I know that you will never know them, perhaps as I never will truly know you. Known you. What I do know is that I might just find nothing.