Party

It is almost the end of the party. I dream every night about what it was like when the party was young. Everything was fresh and new and full of wonder and hope. Now I look at the balloons sinking to the floor under gravity's cruel embrace and the torn streamers dangling melancholic from the rafters and I am haunted by the memory of what was.
The worst part is knowing that I was annoyed by the noise of the music and the party blowers. I was stressed by the chaos of spilled drinks and chip crumbs ground into the carpet under carefree heels.
While the party was happening I barely enjoyed it, I was so worried over the myriad details and eager for a perfection born of fantasy. I wanted organized games, quiet conversation, careful observance of etiquette. It seemed like the party would go on and on and I wished for the madness to end. I didn't know how to enjoy it, how to throw back my head and laugh with the others or dance the night away in blithe merriment.
It took time for me to see the magic contained within the pandemonium, time for me to let go and join in the festivities. And now that I've learned how to do it, the party's almost over. Everyone's gone or leaving, suddenly as serious as I once was. They've grown older and I've grown younger so that once again there is a gap between us, insurmountable as I sit among discarded party hats and other favors on a layer of sparkling confetti, watching them go.
It was a beautiful party.
I wish that it could have lasted forever.

The Forbidden

Bright yellow sun shone down on the grass covered knoll, its heat sending out the subtle smell of earth and fresh green sprouts. The first day of spring brought with it a rare sunny day, and the little mound in the park was filled with all types of people, all of them with their heads facing the heavens, basking in the rays of sunshine that found them equally. A small group of hip young lesbians lounged on a Mexican colored blanket while their small children squirmed over them. A young couple with bronze skin lay contentedly together, lazily stroking each other’s skin. A man sat next to his bicycle eating a dark croissant slowly. Three children played with the dropped fronds of a nearby palm tree.
“Ahhh!!” came the delighted scream of a young Asian woman. She sat on top of her boyfriend, a young white man. She moved her arms close to his body, trying over and over to tickle him, but he was doing the same, lunging his hands towards her torso and ribs. He grabbed her and threw her to the ground playfully. She wiggled under his weight, laughing, trying to find his ribs with her hands. She screamed softly with delight. It was an intimate display of friendship and trust, and they played, rolling and mounting each other, laughing and lunging. Their bodies were not just covered in cloth, but also with wide smiles.
Next to them, a young black girl, no older than four, watched the couple with curiosity. The girl’s hair was braided with rainbow colored beads at the tips. Her eyes were wide open, and a faint smile rested on her lips. Next to her was an older white woman, the girl’s mother, a woman well past middle age and wearing only white. The woman looked at the couple with quick shots of disgust, then gently pushed the little girl’s head back towards her and away from the couple. As soon as the woman took her hand away from the girl’s head, she would turn to look once again. This time, her smile brighter, for now she knew this was something she was not supposed to see.
“Ahhhh!!” the Asian girl laughed. The white woman turned to them, a look of disgust etched across her face. She held her hand in front of the little girl’s eyes, blocking her view, but the girl squirmed and moved her head and looked at the couple again, captivated, knowing that what they did was forbidden and wrong, and the more her mother sighed and cleared her throat, the harder the girl tried to look, her own delight growing with the conflict.
The older woman’s look cried, “There are children here for goodness sake! Children!” In her purity and chastity, she forgot that it was scenes like this that made children, the very child in front of her that she now tried to protect from the urge that kept the planet spinning with cats and flowers and honey. In another moment of ecstatic union, perhaps alone on a bed, the couple might one day create a new being. But now, there were no thoughts of the future. There was only play. There was tickling mixed with kisses and tiny screams. There was grass and sun and the sense that there was no one else around them, though there was. Their shared delight rose into the warm afternoon, creating waves of pleasure for those that could watch without fear, sadness, jealousy or disgust.
The woman looked at them with hard eyes. How long had it been since she had been like that? Alive, laughing uncontrollably, her body thrown every so often to the ground by firmer hands. The child kept finding openings to watch, the annoyance of her mother making the scene so much better. Her eyes fought through the hand that tried to protect her, realizing there was something she should not see, that somehow, for some reason, her mother didn’t like it. She watched, bringing into her two of the many different strains that would one day be a fundamental part of her. Curious fascination with sex and the memory that it should not be happening, her mother told her so, her mother had clearly expressed it without a single word.

Playing at the Borders

In the kitchen they sit around the table, all different shapes and sizes. This one is lean and pretty with a cruel little mouth and matching dark eyes set in a bronze face, another is round and white with a plain face void of any make up, a simple face that reveals a sweet disposition, this other one is short with kinky hair and a perpetually sour look on her clean face, and here is another with springy hair and eyes that are on the verge of snapping shut with fatigue. She is a composite of them all, oscillating between their extremes, unable to be completely cruel, incapable of being wholly jolly, with curls and make up, neither thin nor thick. At the head of the table sits the mother, unlike any of them now that age has overtaken her. With her short haircut and spectacles, her casual pants and striped sweater, she could be the mother of any one of them, or of none of them at all. The sisters sit at the table, and so does the sister in law, bouncing a baby in her lap. The brothers come and go, two of them. One is the master of the house, the father of the little baby bouncing at the table. He has a mustache and a weathered air about him. He looks as if he has stepped out of another era, an era when men were stronger, harsher, almost made of stone. The other is bigger and has a more modern look, he wears a hooded sweatshirt, and he can speak as easily in English as in Spanish. A son in law hovers behind the mother, rubbing her shoulders, drinking and joking.
In the living room, the old uncle sits in a chair wearing his brown hat and a red tropical shirt. He tells the story of his retirement to two women, friends of one of the sisters, one is a painted and bejeweled Latina, the other is the only "Gringa" in the whole bunch. His white whiskered face is tanned and his huge belly heaves as he explains that he left San Francisco, out of boredom after his retirement, and he moved to Florida so he could work again without loosing his pension. After seven years of listening to his wife complain about that land, so similar in climate to their home country of Nicaragua, they returned to San Francisco to find that their old house was now worth a million dollars and far from their financial reach. So they live now in Sacramento, economically exiled from the beautiful windy city, permanently aware of the consequences of a whimsical decision. He tells the story of his years of reckless drinking, and of his mother’s collapse in the middle of the street, which led him to set the bottle down on top of the television set and vow never to touch the stuff again. Then he stands to teach the blonde haired gringa how to salsa.
"March!" he tells her, "Forward… and now back."
They put a cake with a little candle set in its center, shaped like the numeral eight, on a high round table. Everyone comes round. A boy sits on a tall stool in front of the cake and his brothers crowd around him, placing gentle hands on one another’s shoulders. For a moment, in the random course of events, they stand in a line from eldest to youngest. Then the room is filled with song and the candle is extinguished with a soft swoosh of warm breath. The birthday boy’s face is pushed into the cake, leaving his nose and cheeks covered in blue frosting. His brother, the second to the eldest, comes to his aid and wipes his face with a towel as carefully and lovingly as an old kind mother. The cake is cut and the children leave theirs lying about, because they dislike the fruit in the center.
The sun has gone and the light is fading. The children run in a long howling line around the outer perimeter of the house. In the back, there is a built-in swimming pool filled with dirt and weeds instead of water. The concrete around the house is cracked and uneven, moved by decades of seismic activity. Behind the house, there are a series of smaller cottages and sheds, white paint peeling from the wooden boards, rusty old nails sticking out of old forgotten corners. The children keep on playing, running, jumping, screaming, laughing. Dangerous possibilities abound. Plenty of opportunities for a terrible accident. The neighbor’s houses are far off across fields that have lost their golden color under the pale sheen of the moon. The few gates which might confine or protect the children have been thrown open through the course of their raucous parading. They make their way up a long dark street, seeing phantoms in the shadows of every shrub. The very eldest of their party permits himself to tremble a little, and the very youngest pulls herself to her full height and presses on bravely so that they are all one, unified in their quest to touch the unknown.
Inside, the house is brightly lit and the music plays loud and lively. The tiniest children, the babies, ride around over the hard honey colored floor on tricycles, crashing into the legs of the adults, happy to hear them curse. The old Mother dances now with the two friends of her daughter, the Gringa and the painted Latina. The three face each other forming a soft triangle which pulses like a beating heart as they move into the center and then back out. As a unit, they rotate 30 degrees and then back, always suggesting with this motion that they will turn in a complete circle, but never quite fulfilling that suggestion. They shuffle in and out, wiggling their hips, and keeping their wrists limp, subtly invoking a thousand years of hidden sacred dancing.
The windows of the house are small, holding the dark night at bay, framing its deep purple color in little squares of yellow, beige and white. From beyond the little windows, comes the laughter of the running children, still together, still playing at the edge of the known world.