dream: technical rehearsal (slow dance with white shoes)

I’m arriving late, everyone I know seems to be there, in elaborate costumes. We’re rehearsing for something. I walk through the space, looking for the corner that’s mine. I pass many friends and lovers in the first few steps, the men in dresses and the women in lingerie and wigs. I move to another room and settle on a stool to watch performances rehearsed. A very tall man in a monk’s robes performs with a video monitor, telling confusing jokes that come out funny in the end, when he strips of his robes to reveal glowing beads. 

You’re there, waiting to perform, and as you walk just past me I grab your arm. You grab mine back. We stay this way, muscles tensed and bodies close. A count of ten. You kiss me, long and slow and then again, as we move through the crowd to a tiny kitchen, built into the room, where some of the women are practicing their dances. A song is playing, one we both know. We slow dance, wearing matching white keds. We are very close, I can feel your hips and your cock and your ribs against me. I look at our feet. Our shoes are white but I’ve stepped in rust, or orange paint, and every time I step on your feet because I’m bad at dancing, I can see the mark left. I do not mind, because you do not mind. 

The sensation of slow dancing in a dirty white sneakers in a crowded kitchenette is making my heart bloom, my body fall apart. You kiss me again, and then I see a girl do a backbend right behind you, almost hitting you, and I laugh, and we let go. “I’m gonna go pee,” you say.

“I’m gonna go kill this boner with a notebook,” you say. “I’ll meet you back here later.” You are grinning at me in that way I like. I nod. We walk off in separate directions.

I head to the swimming pool in the basement to cool off, and get entangled in an argument about racial politics with some teenagers, and I wake up before you and I meet back up in the kitchen. 

I realize that in my dream you were clean-shaven, but when I saw you last you had a beard, and you look better with a beard, I think. I wanted so badly to take your photograph.