Less Talking #002
The ground is still wet and the woman that I want is unreachable (or Alla Prima!)
I am on a date in the club, which is a funny choice of venue in hindsight. Whilst I try to profess my attraction to this woman and entice her towards comfort and intimacy, our voices are drowned out by erupting disco. We still have fun.
I barely know her, but I hope that this becomes our moment of familiarity. I speak to her, listening to her attentively as she unfolds for me, but we are here to enjoy ourselves. So I pause frequently and dance, ensuring not to forsake the ethos of the night.
She dances too and we stare at each other. She floats effervescently like a fairy and I am consumed with awe of her. Her lips are like oval suns, whose rays I hope will shine upon mine and her body is like golden sand that harkens rest and endless ocean tides. In watching her, I too become blissful sand that intermingles with hers. In the heat of romance, we could fuse and harden passionately, becoming glass, stained by the sighing of our lust. I work for her to want me this same way and so as I speak to her, I whisper quietly for her to draw me in closer.
I dance passionately throughout the night, responding to the sound of the music just as sand would against the surface of a speaker. I am malleable, truly changing shape as the night ensues. She continues to float with the music, and both of us dancing together instils a sense of oneness. I am moving in the right direction.
There is a plethora of wild personalities in this club. Eccentric laughs and ecstatic boogies rumble in tandem throughout the night. There is a delegation of groomsmen beside me that have amassed for a stag-do. They slip over drinks that they have drunkenly spilt over the floor. I see a dark figure passing between their legs.
Alcohol is not their only source of intoxication. Happiness itself is an elixir that they drink straight from the hands of the DJ. Each transition into new song strikes them to feel more. The current song is a fast-paced track from the 70s with raucous horns and a steady drum beat which has the room jumping. The DJ loops a small section, furthering the room’s intensity. They are the pulse of our passion. A glitch happens- for a few seconds the song cuts into irregular silences which makes everyone pause. It is like a brief descent into muddle, from which a new song heroically arrives. EDM, dark and booming, flies out from this intentional mess. The groomsmen cheer.
“Whey hay!”
A man cries, excited by the joy of the groomsmen.
He is tall, far taller than I am and far taller than anyone else in the room.
There are two floors in this club and those on the upper floor can see us from a balcony-view that surrounds us in a circle above. This man is at eye-level with them, a gargantuan titan who can see the whole of the room. He kneels down, trying not to hit his head against the balcony and high-fives all the groomsmen. They cheer again.
My date is just dancing with her eyes closed, smiling prettily. I whisper into her ear.
“Are you okay?”
The lights in the venue flutter blue and her face reflects the same emotive tone. She nods.
“I’ll be okay. I just need to get lost within the music!”
She shouts.
“So dance with me,”
I whisper joyfully into her ear.
She does. Her hands clasp the back of my neck and my hands lay comfortably around her waist. I envision ocean tides washing against the shore and I hold her closer. The music turns us in a circle and I am watching the titan again. He has continued speaking to the groomsmen and he is now fully within them, cheering, laughing and dancing as they do.
He comes further down to speak to them and rejoice. He waves a flag in his hand to ornament his jubilation. It is red and blue with a star in the middle.
“Which flag is that?”
One of the groomsmen asks.
He moves wildly, more merry than any of them and he gets down on his knees, thrusting his arse in the face of the men behind him. Everyone laughs.
“Is that North Korea?”
Another asks.
He cackles in response.
“Whey Hayyy. They’re all together man. Altogether!”
He says, pointing at the flag.
He thrusts his arse even more wildly now and one of the other men approaches him from behind, holding onto his hips jokingly. The cackling continues- all smiles. The groomsman from behind starts to scream. Intermeshing into one, they stop being two separate entities and the lower half of the titan unites with the man behind him until they have only one pair of legs between them and the titan holds up his front half with his two hands. They have become a minotaur-like creature that is both man and mythical. They walk off together awkwardly, disappearing in the mass of people. Everyone cheers the change.
I turn to my woman- Alyssa is her name- as the minotaur walks off. I try to call her attention to what has just happened, but she waves her head gleefully, becoming lost in the music as she had hoped. I don’t disturb her. She is much more used to these settings than I am, so perhaps this is just the norm.
She goes to get a drink.
I follow her, seeking to speak alluringly. My words will be a beach of sweet nothings for me and her to bask in. She orders a redbull with vodka. I smile at her.
“You don’t need to follow me. Dance! Enjoy the music.”
I pause embarrassedly and just laugh to play it off cool.
“Stay where you are. I’ll find you.”
She tells me reassuringly, and so I dance.
I two-step funkily, thrusting my shoulders to the beat as I do. Alyssa is at the bar dancing, boogying softly. We have had a long night- we had eaten dinner just before at a nice restaurant. As we ate, I questioned her about her life, her past, her family, and it became very intense at times as we both delved into the moving and traumatic moments that had engulfed us throughout our lives- moments that had isolated us. I wanted to be washed in her waters of sensuality, catharsis and wanting but I didn’t want us both to drown in our sorrows. Conversation up until the club had been very much like that- profound, intense, sorrowful- and I suddenly come up with the idea that I have done too much. Perhaps, Alyssa isn’t enjoying the night and she has found me too burdensome and morose. I was just trying to get to know her.
She comes back with her drinks, sipping as she dances. I start to move funkily again, to mask my overthinking. She finds me.
“Are you okay?”
I ask again.
“Yes”
She responds.
“I just need energy,”
She takes a big gulp from her straw.
My feet begin to take a life of their own as the DJ plays some Chicago House. This is music from the 90’s, deep from the genre’s origins, when it was music played from sound systems in the ghetto. There is something gritty about this funkiness. It is unlike everything else that we have heard throughout the night and it makes me scrunch my face in pleasant disgust. I am, for a moment, lost. Alyssa celebrates me, cheering ecstatically at my great moves and being wowed by my oneness with the music, but I fall out of step. I look down and realise that I have slipped on drinks spilt across the floor. Alyssa frowns.
The dark figure that I had noticed earlier on in the night is a man who cleans. He crawls across the floor like a massive cockroach. He approaches us, crawling tentatively through the forest of legs and I notice that he has antennae sprouting from his forehead. He looks up at Alyssa, who scowls back at him fearfully. She holds onto me worriedly from behind.
“You can hold me tighter if you want,”
I joke.
The antennae twitch and the cockroach draws cleaning wipes from a box that he is carrying around with him. A bright white shines from a man who is following him with a flashlight. The man shines a light on the spill and the cockroach man leaps to action, cleaning it aggressively. Some of the spill is blue, the same emotive shade of the light that Alyssa glowed earlier, but it is mixed with other liquids and colours too. He puts his all into wiping away the spills and then he crawls away to wherever else the floor encounters liquid. His antennae twitch wherever he finds new spills. The man with the light follows.
Alyssa eases up as he goes.
“What he’s doing is so pointless. Doesn’t he know that he’ll be cleaning all night?”
She complains.
I laugh.
“He can’t stop the spill.”
Alyssa laughs happily, squinting her eyes in deep amusement.
She closes her eyes so the joke must be within her- her own private beach that I will never see. She shakes her head.
She begins to shake rampantly with her hands waving in a circular motion, exaggeratively mocking the cockroach-man’s scrubbing. I laugh at her performance and we fall into each other clumsily.
“I’m just going to sit for a bit.”
She says.
I try to follow her again, with better luck this time. We sit beside each other quietly and I don’t talk at first. She knows that I am not there to dull the mood, but rather be a part of it. I just bounce my head groovily and put my arm around her. She rests one of her hands on my thighs. I think of deep footprints being pressed into sand. I regret our dinner- how I had let the moss of melancholy wash up against us. Conversation should be merry now.
Alyssa leans forward and I let my hands slip behind her waist. Her top is tied up at her chest leaving everything below bare. I feel the warm of her skin against my palm and stretch myself to pull her in closer.
“Are you comfortable?”
I ask.
She nods calmly.
It is wise to move slow. I do not tell Alyssa that I would like to share this moment privately and find an intimate space for us to engage in a scene of shining sun piercing through cooling waves. Instead, I tell her that dancing with her is fun and she smiles. She continues to sip so that she can dance gleefully through the night. I ask her if she has any plans for tomorrow. She says no.
I tell her that I am going to an art gallery tomorrow and that she should come with me if she is not too tired.
“You’re thinking too far ahead! Get lost in this moment. We’re here now.”
She tells me.
I laugh and shrug dismissively.
After a brief pause, I tell her that I just want to spend more time with her. She tells me we can, which is good, but she doesn’t say it with rays of sun bursting from smiling lips as I want her to. There is a distance to her yes, which is something I had noticed before. As she speaks to me, she only looks in my eyes for fleeting breaths, before turning away to glance into her fairy mist. There is a world around her that I cannot see, but that I wish to understand. I no longer want to wash up the moss of melancholy to continue conversation; I want to make her smile and I want her to touch my sand so she can notice how it crumbles in her hands.
I could comment subtly on how I feel her distance. But it feels like a waste to indirectly complain like this. It would create unnecessary ripples of discord in our party-glee. The DJ plays trance-like music that everyone bops silently to. Healthy communication must be worked towards and found in a united state of trust and understanding. It can only work when you are intermeshed so firmly together that you cannot break. I remember the minotaur from earlier in the night.
Alyssa looks at me as if I’ve just done something good and she moves to get more comfortable. Her legs face me and my marriage finger is caught at the meeting of her hips and thighs.
She tells me that she is having a really good night. Lights begin to flash again and she shines the same ocean blue, glowing majestically. The music reaches a high charging point, pulsing into a European techno. A group of friends begin to scream.
They are all women, slightly older than us, being propelled into joy by the DJ. One of them spills their drink on me and then stumbles onto my shoe. I wipe thoroughly, trying not to leave a mess. She apologises profusely, showering words upon me drunkenly. She compliments my trousers- all black with one straight line and another that is curvy, fading into the black- and then she begins to talk about what a spectacular night it is. Alyssa laughs with her and the DJ plays some of the most beautiful music I have ever heard. It is a disco track with an orchestra of strings that levitate playfully like sun-glitters on the surface of the sea. The drums move groovily forward and call Alyssa out of her seat. I can see her blue again, but there are no flashing lights. She dances with the group of women who hug her and pull her in welcomingly. I stand away from them, feeling the pulse of the music, dancing lonelily.
Alyssa talks to the women like she has known them her whole life. I look over the sea of heads in the club and it is full of people intermingling just like this- swathes of oneness gathering throughout. The small cockroach-man passes between it all- a dark presence still- wiping up the multitude of spills in vain.
Alyssa turns to me, full of new jubilation. We dance shimmeringly to some new age disco. The percussion is going manic and it sparks new life into me too. Alyssa does her eyes-closed sway and her blue is ever apparent. She really is a fairy.
“You look gorgeous when you dance.”
I tell her.
“I just love to close my eyes, get lost within it! Get lost…”
She trails off, finding the pulse of the beat again.
This is much better than earlier on- our dinner. I can feel joy erupting from her more and my attraction to her is booming. She comes closer and our shoulders move in identical rhythm, but our lower bodies press against each other in even more uniform fashion. I can see small mounds of sand on the beach, being made wet slightly by water drifting on shore; the translucent blue of the sea becoming one with the sunlight that passes through it; the hardening of glass happening in real time. She is looking up at the balcony above us, still dancing with the music.
“What’s up there?”
She asks.
I pull away to look. I can only see a mass of heads from an odd angle, all glowing the colour of the lights.
“Let’s look.”
I say.
We go up some stairs that are in the centre of the dance floor and we find a small, concentrated group of partygoers amassing together. In flashing lights and smokey mist, there are no distinct faces. Bodies rub up against each other and there is no space to move individually. Alyssa loves it up here- she can see gold ornaments on the wall and pearly diamonds that decorate the ceiling exquisitely. She pulls a vape out of her pocket, inhales it and blows smoke into my face. Now I cannot see her either. I cough unintentionally. She frowns at me, but I cannot really see her, only the lips whose gloss I wish to shine on mine- all over me, in fact.
A song plays, which I love: ‘Lost in Music’ by Sister Sledge. It is a slow feast of old funk, which pounds forward mesmerically. Everyone can feel a shift in the atmosphere. Our bodies are rumbling and moving with the beat. Halfway down the stairs I notice a little pathway into a room. I open its door and there is a white curtain. There is the DJ booth. The DJ is a floating ghoul who I cannot see in opaque darkness. They play with the decks, tampering with another song that is hidden in their headphones. Their room is at halfway height of the room above those on the ground, towering over them, but slightly below the balcony. From here you can see the differences between the two levels of existence- the intoxicating privacy of the balcony and the enthralling openness of the ground. Despite these differences, they are also one-and-the-same, disciples of the music that they follow into trance. I could feel the music pounding within me.
“Your music is great,”
I call from the curtain, like a sinner coming to confession.
“What did you say?”
They shout, trying to hear me more clearly.
They have now moved from the decks to come and speak to me. There is only a void figure behind this curtain- an abstraction of matter.
“Your music is great,”
I repeat.
I hear the DJ laugh loudly.
“Everything that is here has been here.”
They say.
“This music is not mine. These are just feelings. I amass them, I collect them over the years.”
The DJ says, pointing to the stack of vinyls that they have been mixing all night. I feel drawn to the DJ’s presence and I am in awe of their words. The music is just background to me now.
“The role of the DJ is to feel. It is like the DJ has a gun in their heads. Blaow… Feel. All these other DJs… what do they do? 1,2,1,2. No, they are crap.”
They lose me, but I still get what they are saying somewhat.
The DJ stops talking and I realise the ensuing raucous around me. Everyone dances manically and I see the seas emerging, crashing waves coming dangerously towards land- a tsunami. The DJ gets back to his song and I look for Alyssa. She is at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at me and I try to walk down towards her. She sways again- like a fairy- with her head bopping and her eyes closed like she usually does. But she does it too quickly this time. Although she smiles, her shaking head feels like a warning and as I approach her, I feel like I am stepping on hot sand that burns my soles. The music reaches its apotheosis and the dancing of the room is that of riot and emancipation. I have never seen sand float, but I am sure that this is what it feels like. We feel the pulse of the song loudening and it slows down in a psychedelic manner. Warped female voices drive us forward singing: “No turning back” and Alyssa is blue again. There is no light on her and her blue is unmistakably glowing from within her. Everyone has their own colour too. I see the groomsmen, the group of women, the minotaur and the balcony people all glowing their own hues. I check myself, but I am unchanged and in the midst of all this glow, the cockroach man is too- a dark unglowing presence- trying desperately to clean the spills, but it is too late.
‘We’re lost in music!’ is a phrase that is repeated through the song again and again, but the chorus cuts off this time and is interrupted by a loud splat, like the sound of a burst balloon. All the partygoers- the colourful glowing figures- have splattered and turned into glowing rainbow goo spread all over the ground. There are no more people here.
“Alyssa!”
I call, but to no response.
I look at the rainbow goo across the floor and notice strains of ocean blue everywhere.
The DJ booth is empty, but I don’t know where the DJ went. Rainbow goo is dripping from the circular balcony and the ground is full of one singular puddle of goo. We are in total dark- no more flashing lights, no more mist, no more music. The only sound I can hear is that of the cockroach-man screaming at the top of his lungs. He is broken like a dam holding back floods in apocalyptic disaster and he blasts out of the doors, waving fearfully.
“I’ve failed. I’ve failed.”
He screams.
The goo glows, like sun glitters on the ocean and I mutter Alyssa’s name to myself repetitively. I wander out of the doors morosely, thinking about her smile, her sway, her hips, the hardening glass that never was and I walk out of the club, closing the door behind me. It is 5am in the morning. The sky is bright with the violet-blue of newness and I am alone. There are people staring in shock at the club, listening to the tortured cries of the cockroach-man and their judging expressions hurt me more.
I look at the rainbow goo from across the street as some of it bulges from out of the door. I look for deep blue within it or even for someone to walk out, floating fairy-like and closing her eyes as she sways, but the ground is still wet and the woman that I want is unreachable.