Dancing in the moonlight 

You spin me around the small hallway in front of the corner of the pub they were calling a stage. We are constantly dodging the pub goers as they stroll in for their pints. We are dominating. My dress flares out and spins over me. I feel gorgeous. I am immersed in the middle of a polka dot hula hoop. Spinning, Spinning, spinning. 

I couldn’t stop smiling. When I caught a glimpse of your face; I saw your little baby smile. Small and ashamed, but, authentic smile. Your real smile was perpetually embarrassed, like smiling was something to shy away from. I was a big smile; ear to ear, stupidly giggling. 

You lifted me up in your arms and we spun even more. We weren’t watching where we were going and we didn’t care. This annoyed many of the regulars in the pub at the end of Camden Street.  The guy playing with his guitar kept looking up at us, annoyed, “Hey, watch the stand.” He hissed in between lyrics, “Watch it, missus.” 

 We were delirious caught in a drunken ecstasy. In between songs we would run back to the table, chugging back our Guinsesses. Filling our bloated, tired stomachs with more of the black, foamy, poisonous milk. We did this again and again, until it was the other one’s turn to buy another round. 

The solo man on the acoustic guitar continued to glare at us as we threw ourselves around him. He sang Phil Lynott, the familiar “When I passed you in the doorway, well you took me with  glance.” Your baby smile growing; you grabbed and you kept me there. It was impossible to look anywhere but at you. “I could die right now,” you whispered to me. My eyes weld up and everything felt like ours. We ran home to catch the train to your Auntie Lindas and giggled as we ran up the stairs at 2Am into the bedroom. 

Now I sit in bed alone; a new, lonely, sad, bedroom atop a sad home far away from you. When I see you I want to scream. I want to shout and insult and snicker and make you feel as scared as I am. As scared as I am to not have you anymore. Why can’t I have you and not have you at the same time? To know you is to love you and I can never look at you as callously and angrily as you look at me. I think about that night in Dublin often. I felt my most powerful and my most complete. It always terrified me that you could switch it all off within yourself so simply. While, the walls of my home, my security, my nest crashes around me. Then, I am stuck, incomplete, alone. Dancing in the Moonlight, alone in my new bedroom.