The Limits of Words

‘Will you dance with me?’ he said.

She tried to remember if anyone had ever asked her to dance. Maybe it had never happened. Mostly she met guys on dating apps. Sometimes she sent nude pictures before she’d even spoken to them.

Dancing seemed so intimate. The vulnerability of no rehearsal or careful lighting, no filter for clumsiness and no deleting unflattering angles.

She put down Love In The Time Of Cholera, the book she’d picked up at random from the shelf next to her. She looked at him, assessing how weird or dangerous he could be.

 She couldn’t remember seeing him before but his lack of outstanding features made him seem familiar. Her ego normally demanded that she only be interested in above averagely good looking guys and he was certainly average.

She would have flicked past him on a dating app.

‘But this is a library.’ she replied.

‘Yeah’ he said, ‘So we’ve got to be quiet, we could get kicked out.’

He grinned at her, somehow looking both childish and as old as the music all humans can hear in their hearts.

He reached out towards where she sat, in a nook in the M section of adult fiction.

When she tried to explain it to Katie later that evening she couldn’t say why she took his hand. She just did.

And they danced silently in the place beyond the limits of words where love begins.

Analogue social post: supermarket noticeboard, Thirroul.