back and forth

a slice of pizza and an email send me down the subway steps. a black wool coat can't conceal my royal blue '80s tube dress. my toes scrape against knives. the train skips quickly to my stop. I climb out from the underground. I pass model collectors and blond psychics from LA. Bongo drums over French house emanate out from a second floor venue and I see the psytrance club where the euporhia wears off quicker than the e. fragmented memories rain down Tenth Avenue and lure me into a deafening, velvet-walled club. i quickly negotiate the line and step inside.

keep your cigarettes says the coat checker tells me with a wink. i sip a glass of white wine then quickly switch to jack daniels. this reminds me of my tiny flask and I escape to the bathroom to quickly dump it in my drink while bleary-eyed city babies kiss mirrors and girls from New Jersey tug at their miniskirts and crowd up against each other in line.

the dancefloor swells as the minutes crawl past midnight. i press up close to the stage to try to align my pulse with the bass that drives each song, drowning in vinyl. I soak up the rush of feeling alone while surrounded by a million bodies moving to one beat. felix takes the stage and time stops. I breathe in the robotic strobe light, delerious, alive as he mixes electricity into magic. confetti floats on a dense, artificial fog and I feel like a Care Bear on a cloud or an ethereal princess who will disappear at the first sign of morning light.

The music keeps me prisoner until the very last beat drops and then the city envelops me in a shimmering predawn mist. Trampled flyers litter the sidewalks, enthusiastically imploring partygoers to attend an event that has now just ended. Celine Dion’s Titanic theme echoes out from an all-night deli and a glowing Chinese McDonald’s sign lights the frozen sidewalk dotted with sparkling, nameless stars. with a tiny bleep of a button I capture leafless trees in black and white and stare into pixels representing eyes. I stop at the Gramercy to take in a giant Basquiat hanging above the empty bar and then backtrack to watch the sun rise over Fourteenth Street.

In Union Square I finger a folded bill in my coat pocket and glance quickly at the many empty taxis before slipping my Metrocard through a silver turnstile. Underground a trash train sits abandoned across the platform, bright, serene and dirty. Shiny garbage bags piled high ooze excrement and decay, glinting in the static station light.