Admiring from a Distance

 I walked down the steps and out into the street. No one was there, so I lit up a cigarette and began kicking a bottle down the street. “Fuck ‘em,” I began to say. But I knew deep down that there was something erroneous about this. I was actually not in tune with the music that was playing from the park across the way. People were dancing, you see. Strangely, so it seemed to me. I walked over. Everyone turned and looked at me. “Strange music,” I said. They all looked at me as if quizzically. I began to dance in my own awkward way. They began to laugh.

 “Change the music to fit his silly dancing!” one person yelled.

 “We can’t find music for his type,” said the DJ.

 I spat across the field in the direction of the dancers. There was a collective gasp. “I only did that because my mouth is full of phlegm. I meant nothing by it.”

 Again, they laughed. The music started again and they began to dance again. I followed them with my eyes. My eyes seemed to be dancing, and that was enough. They couldn’t, after all, make fun of me for the movement of my eyes, could they?