@Street Text:For whatever reason, I feel like I've been wanting you all my life. You don't understand, I'm so glad we're at the same place at the same time...
How do you tell someone you like her? Do you play it cool? Pretend you don't know her? Feign surprise to facts already known? How do you overcome the urge to express knowledge you shouldn't yet own--her name, or some idiosyncratic behavior only you notice--so excessively attuned to her presence you have been?
Hi, my name is Tim. What's yours?
Five minutes more until 2004, and I sit paralyzed with surprise. It's in the air and it's all around--a crush that has only deepened with the passing years finds new stage in this coming new year. Las Vegas seemed like a harmless, pleasant idea for the holiday, but who knew this trivial choice could hold such overwhelming results?
We're at Ghost Bar in the Palms Hotel, and I am drowning. I do not belong in this sea of shirts--diagonal designs, huge collars unbuttoned one button too many. (Think of all the Nick Lachey wannabes at a PiKapp party and me by myself, their hopeful hipster JT with trucker hat in tow. Okay, maybe I'm just JC, but you get the picture.)
Then I saw her. Standing by me on the stairs, lost in the shadows of the bump-and-grindin' booty-poppers, she dons a white cap to my green. I won't deny it, I'm not trying to hide it, but sometimes I run, sometimes I hide, and sometimes I just stand there. It is a sadistic irony how we recede into darkness the moment everything we ever wanted in this life shines right in front of us.
There was a grace and mystery in her attitude, as if she were a symbol of something. I asked myself, what could she, not a girl not yet a woman, listening to a distant song, be a symbol of?
We against the music--the song voiced a loneliness, an isolation, a shared need for the friend who may never come.
Days of desire, weeks of attraction, months of yearning, years of unbridled love have reached their crossroads in these scant seconds. Baby, baby, give me a sign.
Oops! Some drunk tooly-fooly to my left bumps me into her. Our feet meet in a pedal pucker--kiss, expire. Owing to this jolt, one of the thrills so frequent in the animal kingdom passes between us. Announcing all the difficulties of love in the subtle press of a foot, I sense each of us is too proud to increase the pressure between us, but neither would we withdraw from this spirited union, this trifling touch of toes. It would vanish in a moment, perhaps to reappear, perhaps not. Perhaps no such union ever truly exists. But in this darkness, the meaning of being lonely was almost bearable.
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3--perhaps, we didn't marry, but at least I arose the courage to say, "Hey, Britney"
