disco ball recollections

I don’t like thinking of all that I will miss—the dance, as silly as it might be, with balloons bobbing, skimming the ceiling then dropping a moment before rising up again; and the streamers, plastic and shiny, stretching your face into a fish-like reflection; and the brownies too sweet, and too crispy-edged; the punch, never enough, as if you were meant to find its bowl, each time, empty, with only a warm slurp of liquid left. And the music, every song snapped from the top 40, the songs too familiar and too ordinary to inspire a certain rhythm to steal your feet and sway you into motion. But then, of course, there would be you. I envision how you might look. The image cuts quiet slivers from my heart and throws them into the wind. I want to find you, as clichéd as this sounds, bathed in the webby blue of those disco lights you hate, all the other dancers, crazy and sloppy and orbiting around, and you in the middle: that thin prick of light that gets me going through it all, that makes me whimper with a long-forgotten ease.