We arrived a bit late. There was a galaxy of punks on the grass outside the hall, all over the grass like garbage strewn about, with same consistency: striped, rumpled, shiny with advertisement but covered in grime. They all looked happy enough, and I wished I could feel like I was one of them. To be a part of something: this is the key to happiness.

The air was chilly and for the first time this year, I could see my breath in front of me, faintly. The water vapor from my snug lungs didn't hang around long. You disappeared right away, off to some other planet probably, as it were. I think there are a few things to discuss here.

1) I love punk rock music. I love it like I love to howl and stomp like a child with a sugar-buzz. I love it like I love all rock and roll music, but in a way that is unique. I love it like I love my id, big and dumb. Come with me to see a show, you said. It'll be fun. Oh, woman, you know I love a spectacle.

2) You look so beautiful in that dress. Every time. It's like a nightmare, the recurring kind that teethes in so many layers down your flesh, and you want to rid yourself of it, you want it to be different, but it gets you every time, the same as it ever did. It's like that but in a good way. It's like that but in the best way. Every fucking time. You really like it? you asked. I know you like it, but it's just an old dress.

3) Where did you go? Off to go get something. Someone. To the bathroom? There aren't any restrooms here, outside. There's a cemetery across the street: tombstone carving? Do you know someone who is dead? I feel like a person without a limb, something ghostly about me, the absence a physical presence. I am dressed up too, you know. For you. I don't wear fingernail polish ever. But you said you liked black fingernail polish; I've blown it already, haven't I? Overboard. Throw a life preserver.

At the door stood two giants with their arms folded, in black. One had a haircut that suggested military training and an attitude of gentle madness; the other had a shaved head and sunglasses at night that only ever suggest one thing: I have never been sure what that is. Clad in black, they stood that watch and stood it firm: giants. The both of them, slabs of gristle and hide, motionless. I wondered if they coordinate breathing so they aren't out of sync.

In little fairy rings the punks sprawled on the grass, passing around cigarettes between nicotine and tar-stained fingers covered over in painted-on fingerless gloves and Sharpie marker tattoos, temporary Xes and permanent phone numbers that will bleed into the shower drain come tomorrow. Some of these kids steal from parents; most steal from their own. How can you not, at this age, take everything you get your grubby hands on? They've given it all free thus far, it's just a matter of time before you get the rest. My arms were full of shivering and I brought my head up to touch my neck against the column on which my back leaned.

Spotlights across the street lit the grass up greenish blue, an eerie tint like an aquarium at a strip club. These dark-circled eyes of youngsters bobbing, shifting in listerine blue, with tongues pierced and grown back in and pierced again and surgically split down the center holding little glowing squares and cylinders on them, geometric shapes to bring down doors and houses and stave off sheep and downy goodnights. Corrugated rooves of metal-filled mouths would praxis later on in the night - something wiry and wry might get inside you if you're not careful, oh, your stars are in alignment and your moons are dragging brightly. I thought to myself, please don't make me take one of these, please someone save me from this.

Music, or someone's approximation of a performance art resembling music, rumbled out of the front doors of the ballroom, an old VFW hall with a square lawn and even a flagstone set out front, narrow path leading up to a peaked doorway and the omnipresent ogres in the way of all the fun. Inside, elliptical arcs traced by the few who paid or came with the bands, the insiders, the door guys' cousins and girlfriends, and one lonely-looking couple almost slow-dancing - probably the only people who bought the album and knew all the words - made the modest hall look vault-like, capacious.

From the outside, inside appeared to be a whirl of darkness, a couple of misguided but certainly sincere people with glow sticks and heads thrown back, eyes rolled back further, spun in circles ten feet around. That's pure joy, said one boy, but he was putting something on some young girl's tongue. Is this emo or what? asked some crusty strolling by with illegible patches on a dirty leather jacket and shorts that have probably never seen the light of day or the smelled the scent of ALL. He laughed and stumbled further down the street, off to make out the words to some band you have never heard of and cannot possibly understand, so far underground that the whole scene is just that band.

The electricity of the music pushed out through the doors with a rush, and everyone on the grass simply rose in one swift movement. The band was getting off in a major way: you could feel it, the ticker rising like the sun, slow but sure as tomorrow. I wanted to see you, looking at me to let me know it was okay, but you were still far away somewhere in someone else's arms maybe, or perhaps just noticing the way the trees froze in time against the white backdrop of a masonry mausoleum wall. The music flushed from the hall and everyone on the grass wanted in: immediately.

My post, against one of the non-load-bearing support columns on the fascia of the outside of the building, afforded me prime opportunity to be sucked into the vortex. A black hole occurs when space-time momentarily becomes overlapped; the product of a point-moment(sub 0) and another point-moment(sub 1), when extrapolated out from specially relative space-time coordinates (i.e. point-moments in space-time) into generally relative space-time (i.e. these point-moments and all other point-moments as each relates to every other and the whole fabric of space-time as it relates to these points and to itself) occludes space-time in an observable, fundamentally non-dimensional fashion. The punks gathered quickly round me; I had no time to escape, and I found myself hard up against the armpit, my right shoulder dug into the ribs of a very massive man with twenty punks pressing the back of me: immediately.

From outside of this situation I saw my body floating in three-dimensional space. So this is what it's like to have your chest cavity crushed by a mob, I thought. One moment my body was filled with light against the darkness surrounding, the next moment it was in a different position. Absolute jerk, with no smooth transition from one point to the next. I had been tessered by these punks. It felt like a good hard shove: I was on my knees struggling for breath, but for no reason. I was breathing normally and all my molecules had survived intact. The security guards had held fast, but given up after all the non-paying customers had miraculously filled the building. They had some beers at the bar down the street later on and forgot the whole thing had even happened, which served them well: theoretical and particle physics anomalies were about as helpful to their jobs as were subtle distinctions of jurisprudence such as prior restraint versus right to refuse service.

I didn't forget it. I could never forget a night with you, you said once, and that was a long time ago. That was a long time ago. How had you gotten inside, and when you knelt down to hold my face in your hands, to cock your head and smile, to give me that broken-but-not-dead-and-please-forgive-me-again-this-once gaze, how did you even know it was me? I didn't even know it was me.

Minutes later, the show was done. All parties had disappeared. The house lights were up, and the streamers hung from the ceiling, blue and silver decorations from someone's 50th year of continuous sobriety, according to the faded, fringed sign someone had slightly altered with a rattle-can: "Happy Goth Year, S.o.B." I opened the door to the dressing room, left you standing in the middle of the room with your sleeves hanging off of your shoulders and far past your hands like a sorceress, and the band were smoking clove cigarettes and congratulating each other, the stink and heat of sweat and gear roiling out of the doorway. You were gone again, and you wouldn't be back.