Magic in the air and the Fine Art of Anonymity....

Nothing beats dancing with a beautiful girl whose name you have a hard time remembering because it's crowded on the dancefloor. Nothing beats walking her home and shrouding her shoulders with your jacket to ward off the brittle November air. Nothing beats twirling her around in the late evening autumnal haze. Nothing beats holding her under the limbs of a park evergreen at two thirty in the morning, your bodies tumbled in mulch and dew. Nothing beats waking up with a splash of sunlight in her bedroom and kissing her forehead as you frisk the floor for your respective garments. Nothing beats tucking her in and letting the dog out as you (once again) head to work, because that's how you spend both your days and your nights and your weekends, you work, you sacrifice your health truckling to the whims of rich kids from chicago who've never had to work for much of anything.

Nothing beats the insinuating nod your co-worker gives you when he comments that "You have leaves stuck in your sweater" and you respond with a glazed look of triumph tucked into your smile. Nothing beats booting up your blogg and seeing the reflection of her Good China forehead in the blankness of your pending entry; thinking about how her eyes became wild pebbles rippling across the shore of her lips after you kissed.

Nothing beats reflecting over the sweetness of her breath. Nothing beats mentally raking over the few details you can remember about her five hours later. How her name is Nicole. How she is a philosophy major. How she plays guitar and is five ft. one and with feathery limbs. How she is only twenty. How she said she'd been with three other people before last night.How she had a parent who died from cancer who was two years younger than your dad who also died of cancer.

How her fingertips groped the tip of the sheet as she cloaked her entire body in a mound of warmth. How her body formed parenthesis and ellipses and various lowercase alphabetical shapes as she drifted into the nocturnal key signature of sleep.

Nothing beats wondering if you'll ever see her again. Which, in all honesty, you probably won't.

Nothing stings when she suggests "Do you think we should date?" And all you can do is hold her.

Nothing beats realizing on your way to work that sometime last night your wallet slipped out the side pocket of your jacket and you are short around $150 and have no identification. No school ID. No drivers license. No ATM. Nothing.

Nothing beats realizing this and not caring. Hoping that some bum found the money. Realizing that you, in a way, feel emanicipated from the tiny laminated rectangular gloss that so readily informs the world your eye color, of your height Of which organs you'd like to have donated. Of when your driving priveledges expire.

Nothing beats realizing who you are, on your own, with nothing but the memory of a smile. A plucked visual petal kissed from the nostalgia of someone else's lips.