The dust underneath my fingernails was gritty, slow to the touch. As I rubbed it on the metal stairs, equally sturdy and rickety, the texture reminded me of the slowness of life. Life as friction, as speed bumps rendered microscopic, each particle of dust serving as a reminder that the laws of physics still exist and still hold dominion over my life.

Friction defines our lives and our interactions with people.  The negotiation between two people, three people, a group is constant — a word, a sentence, thrown across the chasm that divides us.  When we are more intimate, we let our skin do the talking, a rub or touch, a push here, a pull there.  Just two membranes rubbing against each other.

On that metal stoop, on those unyielding stairs, I stared unfocused at everything.  The road sign blinked in staccato rhythm, this way. This way. The arrow blinked at me, I blinked back. This way, please, it said. This. This. This way.

But was its advice good?  Was it sensible?  Did I have enough understanding to see its hidden words, its quiet call to gothatway, to go elsewhere than where I was?

The two metal grilles behind me, a door, a portal into a home (I think), was doubled up, making my eyes cross as I tried to decipher its tracings, its path. Did it have a message for me, too?  The pattern of the crosshatchings, the stitchings of metal, weaved in and out with reality and with my senses until I became unfocused, unseeing enough to see what was really there.

Later, when I went thataway, elsewhere, down the street and around the block, the stillness of the night contrasted nicely with the solid activity of the deaf people on the street, on the sidewalk, providing a visual reminder—a visual feast of thoughts that extended into the air, into the quiet night, until the very air shook with their glad words and angsty tidings. As an observer, I sat apart and felt, saw, and smiled at the utter ridiculous sanity of all that I saw. I am simply one of them, but by stopping, by sitting on the stone wall, the cold stone wall that beat in sync with my pulse equally as it constricted it, I was able to see the truth, that we all march inexorably to the same bi-valved drummer.

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

The wet, gray sidewalk stretched in front of me, seams in between each block of concrete marking the rhythm of my walking.  Step, step, seam, step step, seam, an endless procession tap-tap-tapping the sole of my shoe.  Rivulets of clean dirty rainwater surround each footstep, spreading as I put my weight down.

The rain continues to fall headlong, following gravity’s mad rush downward, inward, striving in vain to reach the center of everything.  The water and cold air are in cahoots, working together to build me a cold rain hat as the rain fills my hair.  Tap tap tap, plit plit, step, seam step the world moves by slowly, cars drive by quickly, and a small gust of wind reminds me to breathe.

I want to keep on walking forever, straight, left, and right down the street, towards no destination (but having one anyway).  I close my eyes and walk for a while, blind, seeing only the dim light filtered through the cracks of my eyelids.  Balancing on my legs, I feel the world embrace me for a moment, wind, rain, earth and the fire in my belly.  For a second, I open my eyes to reassure myself that I am still alive.

I am, and I keep walking, eyes closed, with a smile on my face and streams of water trickling down my cheeks.  After a minute, I open my eyes; the depth of what I saw was starting to overwhelm me and reality needed its due.  Seam, step step, seam squish the endless concrete gave away to a patch of grass.

There, I stopped under a tree not to escape the falling rain but to meet a new species of quiet, still air; the kind of air only you can get beneath a tree, filtered fragrant and full of life.  After that pause, the walk continued, I continued walking, the walking continued me.  I walked.  And kept on walking.

To sweat, to dance, to live.

In the line for the dance club, we writhed with serpentine energy around the corners, slowly, quickly, until at last we were in.  There was sweat everywhere; the cold water bottle in my hands, the neck of a tattooed man, the brow of a friend–the very air dripped.

We were in Town, and the town was in us.

It was not until I paused briefly in a closed room on the second floor that I realized that the manic energy of the dance floor had gripped me with full force.  In that cool windowed room, staffed with couches and languorous bodies pausing for an eternal moment, the world stopped in between beats of music.

Exiting the room required conscious decision, the opening of doors, and goals—be it to enter the music again or go to the restroom.  Enter the music I did, looking for my compatriots, my friends, familiar faces in a clean sewer of flowing bodies.

Found, lost, and found again I allowed myself to drown in the beat, heat, and beat of the music.  It pressed against me and danced away, both flirting and repelling, forked tongue and angel’s touch to my whirling senses.  Stepped-on toes and brushes with backs, breasts, hinds, and arms were the currency of the floor, lubricated with sweat and sound, fortified with alcohol and drugs, the dance economy was in full swing.

Shuffles and swings were bid upon and partnerships made and lost in the blink of an eye.  The flickering of the television screens throbbed while we were robbed senseless of our sanity only to be returned to earth in the next moment with a crash of bass.

The restroom was another brief respite from movement, the only remnant was my foot unconsciously tapping as I stood at the stall.  In that small space, in the middle of a large building, in its heart, I was drunk and sober, hungry and full, poised on the precipice between alive and dead.  A choice had to be made, and unmade; I chose to die and through that, live.

When a silky sweet and drunk Indian girl sat next to me on the hard wooden bench, I realized that we had been there long enough to become part of the crowd.  The room had filled up enough with preppy bodies, indistinguishable from each other except by color, that we had become anonymous like the television in the corner.

They swayed with the music, as we (me and my friend) continued to talk at the table.  To and fro, drama quickly begun and as quickly ended, the dancers remained always faithful to the music.  They followed the beat, one-two’ing and grinding into each other with plastic amused smiles.  One-two, three-four-five, one-two.

The drunk Indian girl sat there without saying anything for a few minutes, looking at turns bashful and quizzically at us.  When she continued not to say anything, my friend said hello.  I waved.  She looked at us quickly and then looked down.  She was not shy, though, and seemed to have only stumbled into our quiet harbor out of chance, out of a need to sit down.

She finally asked my friend something, something that we could not understand.  Oh, yes, we are deaf — yes.  Deaf.  She tried to whisper in my ear, and also prompted me to repeat what my friend was saying in her ear.  In a swirl of dark presence, she left the table; only to be seen shortly after slowly dancing with an tony automaton with douche hair.

During those surreal moments where she joined our space, our table, for a time; we were connected however tenuously to the electric field of bodies around us.  Not long after that, purses were deposited at our table for safekeeping, with a slurred apology/request.  This was from a group of girls newly inserted into the scene, ready to dance.

In the corner stood a short man, of short stature, of short patience and short chances of getting some that night.  For he was an average frustrated chump, pecking at the fringes of the dancing bodies, hoping to catch a stray connection or glance, so he could be pulled in.  Pulled in the weaving mass, to be woven, touched, and wanted.

We saw him shortly after, shuffling away down the street, alone.  He didn’t have that air of quiet desperation around him; worse, he had that sense of eager, alert optimism—the kind of optimism and weird confidence that imbues every creepy person out there.

Our thoughts often turned to the curves on every beautiful woman dancing and the admiring smiles on the mens’ faces, connecting the dots, following the trigonometry of desire to its natural conclusion—a dream made manifest in reality.