Everywhere and Nowhere

I've been dancing with strangers. They hold me close, whisper to me, smile, and I feel nothing but the respite from my thoughts that movement brings, hear nothing but the music and my breath. They look in my eyes and I find myself wondering what they see because when I look back at them all I see is you. Or your absence, but does it really matter which it is? Absent or not ours is the story I can't seem to put down--stubbornly rereading the last pages over and over again, willing there to be a different ending. So I've been dancing with strangers. Their hands are tender and coaxing their voices soft and compelling. They tell me I'm the sweetest thing they've ever seen and I think I hear the echo of your voice in theirs, I think: lies like these are far too easy to tell. I want to scream that I can't hear them, cannot see or feel them, that my reality right now is silent and empty, that their warmth cannot reach me here. I want to tell them that there is no belief left in me--only the certain knowledge that their eventual betrayal, their inevitable lies will mean less to me because I will never again allow myself to care the way I did with you. But I say none of this, only smile as they lead me out the door, thinking surely in such a large city they will take me somewhere new, somewhere where I have not been with you, somewhere where I can allow myself to be distracted, allow myself to forget for a little that with you everywhere I am nowhere.