Dancing queens

Three queer men of colour meet on the dance floor in Cambridge. It’s Thursday. They are out, trying, it seems, to set the night and their worries ablaze. How amazing it is that the lost find each other? That misery finds her cousins?

Tonight they dance, hips moving in frenetic intensity, knees buckling and bending to the bass, faces contorting into that look that is halfway way between a grimace and unbridled pleasure.

Tonight they are the belles of the ball — the people everyone wishes they could be, unencumbered by the shackles of self consciousness or draconian gender norms

It must be amazing to watch them, these three boys. To see them move with a playful dexterity, changing tempo with enviable facility between different genres of pop music. They twirl, shake, bend and snap back, wishing, it seems, that this moment becomes boundless. That the music never stops. That they dance and dance and dance themselves right to their graves. How brilliant would it be to die with djadja playing in the background?

But the lights turn on. The music quiets, and the bartenders are already stowing away the stools and wiping down the bar counter. What else can they do but hug each other, and exchange promises of meeting again, in this impossible place, with their fellow joy chasers.

The next morning, they rise to a life unchanged. Misery is there. A thumping headache, and a hangover too, but not from the imbibing from the night past, but from this new day, and every day before it.