Screaming Into the Void

Strike another match, go start anew

The people who think Midge did nothing wrong have clearly never been outed before. They’ve never experienced violence because of their sexuality.

Moonlight Serenade playing from another room

Not here, and not yet, but it’s the thought that weighs heavily on your minds. It threatens to disrupt the peaceful reprieve you have both managed to seek out from the party. Away from that crowded, smoky dance floor, and out into the gardens, where the evening is cool and fragrant. Everything is muted out here, softer, both sound and sight. 

Alone together. One offers a hand, the other takes it, and you begin to dance. 

For now, the idea of war is an ocean away. For now, you have the golden streams of light that spill out from the French windows, letting your shadows on the wet cobblestone stretch longer as you sway to a muffled tune. 

Neither of you speak. The atmosphere is rich and dense with the delicate swell of instrumentals, the cloying scent of hyacinths, with the weight of words left unsaid. It’s a last dance. It’s a goodbye. But above all, it is a theft. Possibilities, moments in time, the growth of something more, all taken away by forces much larger than either of you. 

Your eyes drift closed, and everything fades to the back of your mind except for the person in front of you. Your awareness has narrowed down to a few sensations, cataloguing them in your mind and stashing them away for safe keeping. Hands clasped together, a soft cheek leaning on a wool-clad shoulder, a hushed sigh close to an ear. Hair being brushed back, the sweep of eyelashes over cheekbone, the reassuring warmth of another person. 

Chest to chest, heart to heart. You wish that this dance would never end, continue like the constant, never changing cadence of the music. You wish that you could capture this moment in amber, moving neither forwards or backwards, only a gentle sway to a distant song. 

Lovefool by The Cardigans except you can hear it playing in the woods, distantly, and you’re trying to follow it to find the source. You’ve heard things about this particular forest – about the fae who live here, about the changes that those who’ve encountered them have gone through – but you can’t find it in you to turn back. You feel a need, deep in your heart, to find whoever or whatever is playing it. To obey the song.

American Pie by Don McLean except you’re sitting out on the rocking chair on the back porch of your family’s farmhouse, and you can hear your brother and his friends having a bit of a get-together in the barn and blasting it from their stereo. You’d join in, but you don’t know them well enough. You’re just fine out here, anyway.

I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire by The Ink Spots except from an old radio on your back porch in West Virginia, and you’ve got the bonfire going.

Riptide by Vance Joy except out of a radio that you’ve brought with you while camping alone – which you now think was a bad idea, because you can hear a storm rolling in, and you’re not sure if you can protect your fire well enough by the time it starts raining. But the music makes you a little more hopeful, a little more motivated.