My Girl, Up On Stage

It's still strange seeing her up on that stage, performing for an entire world full of people that want to know her. In a city impossibly large and even more impossibly populated, here was a woman I knew intimately now sharing herself with an auditorium full of people that may or may not give a damn, albeit their greater attention seemed to indicate that they did.

I suppose I ought to have felt flattered, or at least on some level lucky to know her the way I did. But that's not what I felt at all. I had explored every inch of her, and she had done the same. I had seen and felt more of her own body than anybody ought to; the same mouth out of which she was pouring herself unto the crowd had been filled with my own flesh only the night before, and likely would again tonight. And yet here she was sharing it with myriad strangers wishing themselves on her. She was beautiful up there on that stage, where everybody could see.

And I hated it.

Which isn't to say I wasn't immensely proud of her, and secretly bursting with rather juvenile pomp. But for all of my security and confidence in what we had, it would never be quite enough to suppress the primal jealousy I felt each and every time she would showcase herself to a roomful of moribundly amorous men imagining my fiancee into all manner of exploits that I surely would have stamped out in a blind rage had I any direct evidence.

Sure I was going home with her when this was all over. But I don't like sharing a bed with anybody I don't trust, and sometimes as she'd stand up there behind that microphone, eyes closed and spilling herself out into the darkened theatre, I couldn't help but feel like I was just another head on a pillow.

For one hour every Saturday night, I was little more to her than the glassy-eyed bachelor I was when we had met, and on the same level as every other guy in the joint. And I hated it.

For one hour every Saturday night, I drank myself just deep enough to pretend that we hadn't met, and that we still might.

For one hour every Saturday night, she was everybody's baby.