Hearts of Glass

(image taken from Kitten)

(image taken from Lehigh Valley Live)

(image taken from Ribbon Around Da Bomb)

(image taken from Listal)  

Yesterday, Debbie Harry turned sixty-eight, an age at once laughably arcane and painfully close. Time has been strange and elusive to me lately; since moving, new city and new tastes and new smells, old friends, new friends, I never seem to stop moving, even when I wake, a comfortable sweat collates from a night of speeding dreams, eerie and horrifying and beautiful. A friend of mine from high school came the other weekend, for a brief but delightful visit; she is well, different but also the same, as I hope that I, too, am, someone familiar but someone also new and exciting to explore and continue to cultivate these relationships. This past weekend, another friend, from university, similarly, we are both new yet the same, I can still see a trance of mischief in her smile. It seems to be a success to say we both are happier now, happier than then, without forgetting that which first led us to find such friendship. Commiseration. I am proud, of us both.

Singing karaoke for the first time in a public space, somewhere loud and open and with strangers, we selected a tried and true Blondie song, simultaneously safe and rebellious, like us. Mostly giddy but fueled by alcohol as well, we ran to the train, nervous, not wanting to spend the early hours of a dark morning wandering the streets, but also not caring if we were forever trapped here, atonal, dancing the same rhythmic discombobulation of hips and open smiles.

When we were all younger, the whole group, a dance competition: Madonna against those familiarly simple subversive post-disco beats. My earrings broke from the effort of dancing. The floor warped beneath our shaking bodies, convulsing wood in sinoidal waves. We laughed and laughed, knowing and yet, not knowing, years from then, we would still hold such a place for one another in our hearts.