Other Fugitives and Other Strangers

The nightclub’s neon light glows red with anxiety as I wait on the turning lane. Cars blur past, their headlights white as charcoal. I trust each driver not to swerve. I trust each stranger not to kill me and let me cross the shadow of his smoky path. Trust is all I have for patrons at the bar: one man offers me a line, one man buys the kamikaze, another drinks it. Yet another wraps his arm around my waist. I trust him not to harm my body as much as he expects his body to remain unharmed. One man asks me to the dance floor, one asks me to a second drink, another asks me home. I dance, I drink, I follow. I can trust a man without clothes. Naked he conceals no weapons, no threat but the blood in his erection. His bed unfamiliar, only temporarily. Pillows without loyalty absorb the weight of any man, betray the scent of the men who came before. I trust a stranger’s tongue to tell me nothing valuable. It makes no promises of truth or lies, it doesn’t swear commitments. The stranger’s hands take their time exploring. Undisguised, they do not turn to claws or pretend artistic skill to draw configurations on my flesh. They are only human hands with fingertips unsentimental with discoveries, without nostalgia for what they leave behind. I trust this stranger not to stay inside me once he enters me. I trust him to release me from the blame of pleasure. The pain I exit with no greater than the loneliness that takes me to the bar. He says good night, I give him back those words, taking nothing with me that is his. The front door shuts behind me, the gravel driveway ushers me away. The rearview mirror loses sight of threshold, house, sidewalk, street. Driving by the nightclub I pass a car impatient on the turning lane. My hands are cold and itch to swerve the wheel, to brand his fender with the fury of my headlights. But I let this stranger live to struggle through the heat and sweat of false affections, anonymous and borrowed like the glass that washed my prints to hold another patron’s drink.