Fall Fling Mixer

This is it: kid's bunny-fucking on the dance floor, dry humping, steady moving of the hips, gentle rotation for six hours on end, girl rubbing, guy rubbing, both staring blankly - bleakly ahead. Air hot and humid, gym walls beginning to sweat like its patrons. The floor slick and sticky with spiked punch and spit. Fat girls crying because no one will notice them for the right reason (or, rather, the reason they'd hoped for). Insecure girls standing stock-still, boys milling around, on a constant, formidable, boring search, everyone awkwardly catching each others eyes, people we don't know, look away, don't look back. Rejection. Possession. Sexual tension being unleashed in a radical but frustratedly inept display. According to some, people are fingered in the middle of the dance floor. Boys come out exuberant, triumphant - and the girls come out spent, confused, and perkily pretending. Because no one wants to admit it. There was something foul about the whole experience. A certain humiliation. A certain surrender of romance. A certain lack of excitement. Of course, tomorrow, this will be catalogued as a rager, people will gush - but it was boring, trust me. We will pretend it was fun, but all we did was watch twelve year old awkward, short boys and girls dry-fuck as music blared, too loud, and a strobe light confused those less intelligent. And none of us found a prince charming, and none of the boys found a Jessica Alba. These are ugly years we now front, and I wish I could just sit down with these kids, and just - talk to them. Try to know them on less than a physical level. Because what is appearance but a random assertion of lips and eyes and bones and good or bad skin? I am bad at finding people on that level. I have to see below it. I have to know the mind that dwells below - smart, stupid, fun, boring, sharp, obtuse, nice, mean, good, evil? Who cares who rubs up against you, really? If nothing, these dances teach a certain abandonment of the body. Who cares if someones dick, hard, sits neatly between your buttocks? We're all just bodies. It's all just skin. And we're all of us sweating, hot, red-faced, but unable to contain our boredom, just waiting for the magic everyone promised us to kick in. You lust after a drink about twenty minutes in and, of course, no one has anything. You wish you were on drugs. You wish you weren't sober. You wish someone would take you totally away from the situation, that an angel would descend - that, fuck, your parents would descend, and say it's time to go home, that's enough playtime now, urge you to thank those who invited you. But when the final song plays, and we file out in one big amoeba rush, none of us caring that we're pressing up against dicks and paunches and breasts - budding, stuffed, bloomed and otherwise - because we learn not to care. And after that, you wonder how sex can be fun. And you walk into the freezing cold, in your mini that you spent hours debating over in your head (would it make you look fat? Skanky? Would your underpants show if you started grinding?), in your boob tube - nipples showing through, and... You go home. To your suburbs, dreading the onset of adulthood, because as awkward as these times are, I know and you know growing up will be even more arduous, and even more magical pleasures you were promised will be disproved, debunked, and you will be shown the light: the delusion that you have suffered. Because, no, life isn't a fairytale and nor is it a tween movie. Nothing particularly exciting happens. But in ten minutes, your mom will be here to pick you up, and in eighty years, you get to decide whether this night was worth the bracelet you lost in the process. And you blink. And you're home in bed. That was it.