February 06, 2005

It happened like this:

At 7 o’clock the auditorium was packed with beautiful people. This was the first time that all the tickets for Laurier’s Fringe festival sold out. For a few moments I stood at the front of the room waving and smiling at everyone until Helen came to say hello wearing her red scarf and chic hat. She looked smashing. We were loud and exuberant as we sat down in the last two remaining seats.

That’s when the pretty girl sitting to our right turned towards us and asked, “Are you Tudor?” I awkwardly shook her left hand. “I’m Laura,” she said. Yes, she was the Laura whose blog is full of outbursts of desire, the Laura I’ve been trying to find for days.

I was happy to meet her. We started laughing hysterically in the auditorium in the middle of the plays even when there was nothing funny on stage. English majors have a fucked up sense of humour. Helen got pissed at our outbursts of hilarity and after the intermission she refused to sit with us.

Once the plays were over I asked Laura where she was headed.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Come to the Fringe after-party.”

“O.K.”

We followed a man on a scooter through the hallways and over fields of ice and mud. To get into the after-party we crawled through an open window, and just as we were getting comfortable Laura, who judged the plays, decided she had to return to school. She forgot to hand in her scores. We crawled out through the same window and ran hand-in-hand towards the auditorium, slipping and laughing like mad kids.

On our way back from the auditorium she tried to beat me up in a parking lot in the middle of an argument about cock and the Marquis de Sade. We were slightly bruised and hollering when we returned to the party where we groped people and talked with Regan about machines.

“What is natural? Are we even human?” Laura asked.

“Penguins. No.” Regan answered.

“Machines are the only things that make us human,” I said. Making sense was optional.

The Fringe prizes were announced at midnight on the front lawn where 50 shivering and drunk kids cheered loudly. The jocks across the street screamed at us to shut the fuck up, and in response we cheered even louder, shouting our love into the night, before rushing back inside to find booze, hash, and warmth.

Inside, Laura and I took over an empty couch and talked for three mad hours about nipples and plays and ways of hitting people. Laura is violent and sublime. She hit me now and again and laughed when I hit her back until the tips of our fingers touched and our hands were suddenly glued together and sweating.

Warm fingers caressed each other, seeking to know strange palms and knuckles and bones on backs of hands. Her grip was strong and muscular. I wanted to tell her how wonderful her hands felt in mine, and how small and full of energy and wrinkles they were, but there was no need to state the obvious.

Instead, we held hands and listened to strange men promising to kill each other with dildoes. And at three in the morning we crawled out into the night through the open window. I was shivering slightly; Laura took off her red scarf and I wrapped it around my head.

We found her car and she gave me a ride home. I shook her hand on my driveway as we said goodbye, and at four in the morning I fell asleep with a ridiculous grin on my face.

Holding hands with strangers is good for the soul.