We Longed for Parties
Remembering what it felt to be held and
kissed by friends and strangers.
We were
born to be
kissed
in the dark
"The Week Our Reality Broke" and where
I, Raymond Brogan, was quoted saying, "It's a glitch in the matrix is all".
this was a series reflecting on a year of living with the coronavirus pandemic and how it has affected American society.
Let us recite an irreverent prayer for the club, the disco, the spot.
For the battleground of our unleashing, the church of our weekly baptisms of the bitter week, the tent show revival of our rapture.
Let us bow our heads and say “Remember when …” as if we are as old as Methuselah, as if we’ve seen all the world wars and we know the taste of tombstones.
Remember when we danced?
Remember when you did the cha-cha slide, popped and locked, stepped and bounced, worked the week off your bones, let your spirit stretch out across the dance floor, let the bartender and the DJ be your gurus?
Remember when we used to move among one another like a shaggy herd of buffalo or a plush patch of mushrooms, the invisible antennae on our skin electrified by intermittent touching, random bumping, indifferent brushing by, and in that indifference was a kind of love?
Remember when touching was a way to the moon or a way to assume the glow of a moon?
Remember when we memorialized special occasions in sweat on foreheads,
in crevices of the body volcanic with
the touch of strangers,
the melting heat of a room made
only for your joy?
Remember the smell of someone’s funk and someone else’s sweat and vomit? The hum of fear and lust and envy and joy stinking up the joint, a thick ether of escape and ecstasy? The feet under the stall.
The movements of being exposed and yet hiding behind the curtains of namelessness. The life sticking to your body that is not just your own to claim.
The life sticking to your body that is not just your own to claim.
Remember that darkness where when our eyes adjust, we find the true face of hunger?
In the dark where the faces of friends metamorphose into lovers.
In the dark where first-timers become old souls, where paradise is regained and remixed on a Saturday night.
In the dark where the weekend is
promiscuous with hours.
In the dark, we become kissin’-friends.
Not quite like what Zora Neale Hurston meant but close. We kiss the deepest secrets that lie unknown and unspoken in another’s body, in their crook of arms, behind pierced ears, in the leathered lap of an ant-infested couch in the corner.
A corner of the world that has seen more love than most.
Inside the club, time is suspended like the charged space between double-Dutch ropes. A space governed by music and the pulse of the universe that echoes in all our chests. We jump in the ropes together. Or we turn the ropes together to weave a space all our own.
I hear Nina Simone singing “in the dark it’s just you and I,” but it’s not. It’s all of us. She sings to “the beat of my poor heart,” and it’s a million poor hearts beating, but there’s no dance floor to keep the time we’ve all lost.
Kissing was a way to touch the other side of the moon. When you kissed me in the dark that night, time made sense in a way that it doesn’t anymore.
Here we are now, older souls trying to remember what it felt to be touched, held, kissed by friends and strangers.
Hurston said, "my tongue is in my friend’s mouth ." Here I am recalling my no-name in your new mouth.
You pressed fingertips upon my lips, and we danced a dirty dance in front of everyone’s eyes and had no cares because our bodies knew a truth about each other. A truth that didn’t need a name, only a song.
As Lil Green said, "we were born to
be kissed in the dark".
And with runs in the night’s pantyhose, we walked out of the club before the day’s bag of waters arrived.
Remember?
The air was less charged and less ancient.
Life was less lush.
THE END
OR IS IT?
I have traversed my memories of what used to be, compared it to what is "today".
I know you all have as well, while scrolling through this "history" of ours.
I will ask the question that "we are" all afraid to ask.
I will dare to be "brave" in this new world.
I will risk it all "so others will know".
WHAT HAPPENED TO US?
NOTE:
This quote has an answer starter for you hidden within.
Here is the key:
Take all the quoted words only and put them in the order as they appear,
once you do that,
add your answer to the question just asked,
and that is YOUR answer
to the question that must be answered by all!
Made with Love by:
Raymond Brogan