Lost

Red liquor, a warm breeze, orange-tinted chairs. The evening has turned into a slow dance. People are asking for ice.

She is tipsy and drowning in a pool of music and low, inaudible chatter, still mildly conscious that what she is doing is trying to keep afloat in the crowd of twenty-somethings she had so unceremoniously found herself, some hours earlier.

Loud cheering erupts at the first strains of a popular rock song, and she turns to look at the band. Her eyes meet his and they both smile. She remembers watching his fingers fly, light and sure, over the guitar strings, and realizes she'd lost track of him when the alcohol started quickly working its way through her nerves.

He nods, and she wants to believe she knows what that nod means. They are both anachronisms here, after all; both lost, in some shared, unutterable way. The bench he's sitting on seems too short for him, somehow, and she giggles and raises her glass to him.

For a moment, her head feels clear, and her smile creeps from her lips to her soul, and she is asking, could I, perhaps now, risk my silence for your keys and strings? A promise of other moonlit conversations gleams from afar; in the muted distance, soft music waits.

Ah, but the moment, like most other moments, darts into a blur of bygones. A waiter asks if she wants a refill, and she hands her glass to him. While he's pouring the drink, she looks down at her hands. Still slightly intoxicated, she finds herself back in the subdued safety of obtuseness, where questions so often get lost in tangents, and answers, though found, are seldom ever the ones to the questions we ask.

By the time she raises her head again, he is no longer looking.