Pitchfork

I keep flashing back to flame-colored confetti and too many bodies too close for comfort. Air without oxygen, filled instead with the summer smells of sweat and weed. Pink laughing eyes and slow bored smiles. Chests, elbows, hips, groins, thighs, knees, ankles. Feet in converses or hemp sandals. Plaid as far as the eye can see.

Earlier a woman with too-tan skin but impishly bright, green eyes asked us if we were still in college. We nodded. Someone said, "Class of twenty-twelve."

The sky was blue and cloudless. The grass: trampled. Everything was smudgy with blonde dust and indiscrete smoke. A few yards away, a gaggle of teenagers nonchalantly shared a pipe shaped like a blowfish in the broad, omniscient daylight.

The woman asked if we were from Canada.

"Everyone is," she said. "I've met three people and they're all from Canada." Turning to Nick, she added, "And you're the only one of them wearing a Canada shirt." She was slurring; it was sloppy. But her smile was pure.

I wanted to say, "Dual citizenship."

It was beside the point and I knew that.

Once a man at an Ontario tattoo parlor asked me if Iowa was the place that was pretty much just a cornfield with a house in it. He was painting a dragon (red, eastern style) on the beach-browned flesh of my skinny right bicep. Beside me, my Canadian friend, waiting patiently for her own green dragon, giggled. The States are a joke when you're not in them. I told them, "Not really.." I made myself laugh, but I didn't think it was funny; at least, not at the time.

The dragon, subjected to constant assault by Lake Heron waves, faded to nothing more than a scabby freckling of pigment in three days, and vanished completely by the end of the week.

But I digress.

So:

There we were, in Chicago. After M83, the crowd surged, tightened. We got caught somewhere in the middle, unable to breathe, let alone fidget. We waited and whined, bobbed up and down in restlessness, boredom, and anxiety. Night fell when we weren't looking. And suddenly, after an eternity or two, the waiting was over. 

Pyschadelic montages of naked dancing women crackling across the jumbo-tron. Giddy drunken crowd surfers almost falling, almost falling again, being saved at the last available second by clumsy, anonymous hands. Sometimes my own. Balloons orbiting the crowd like planets. Flimsy rectangles of orange and red paper swarming down from the stars. Not just confetti guns, but bona fide confetti canons. Even if I threw my head back as far as it could go, so that my hair tickled my waist and neck strained, I couldn't see the end of the confetti. It could have come from the heavens themselves for all I knew. I held my arms above my head and opened my hands, fingers wiggling. It felt like dancing in the rain. 

Grinding with strangers was inevitable, unavoidable. In that moment: Innocent. Natural. Easy. Singing along was a matter of breath. Being there was being young, being free.

The "livened up" rootbeer stung only once it reached the back of my throat. It kicked a little too strong but a little too late.

I was itchy like other people's dreadlocks.

I could feel the music equally in the tender palms of my hands and the calloused soles of my feet. Instead of blood we had that beat.

It was a maybe a cliché. I am maybe a romantic: it was classic.

There would be fireflies winking selatiously back and forth across the yard. Your hand in mine. In the grass a few yards away, something moving. Midnight whispering against itself. The sound of spray paint in an alley. Like breath. Like ours. 

friend

In your youth, you were an emblem of youth. The sound your legs made as they moved beneath your skirts was a secret language, in which they bragged of their own strength and dared every boy and girl you passed to make their way up your thighs. When you laughed, you threw everything into it: stomach, lungs, shoulders, eyes. The conviction with which you spoke made a riddle of every contradition, and a saga of every lie. Your breath burned like a high in my throat when we stood close enough to trade secrets.

I'm not going to say that I loved you, because I hope you can make up your own mind. 

In later years, I no longer knew what to make of you. It seemed incredible to me that you retained the same electric blue eyes. You were a stranger and I missed you so much that sometimes at night got sick to my stomach. Once or twice I vomited in the kitchen sink by starlight, always missing a strand or two of hair when I tried to hold it all back.

I felt the same self-righteous disappointment with you that I felt with poorly cast movies made from the beautiful books that I had kept under my pillow as a child.

"No but she was suposed to have wavy hair," I would whisper to my bored companions in the listening dark of the theater. Or else I would scoff, "He would never have worn Adidas!"

With you I thought the same sorts of things, only there was no one there but you to whisper to. And that, of course, would never do. I think I bit my tongue until it bled.