Serenades and seating charts

"I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does."  Jorge Luis Borges

She no longer knows what bothers her more, artifice or avarice. Or was it just the emptiness, overwhelming and ravenous as it engulfed every crevice of her soul?

Perhaps it was merely the fact that she was a prude playing the game. Ever defensive, overwrought, a highly strung muse to so many... lurking in corners waiting for some inspiration of her own. Always on the lookout for the one roguish, gypsy, genius with means in want of a quirky woman over an easy one. It was the wait that truly crippled her. That state of expectations piled one on top of the other. It corroded all optimism and all passion, leaving in its wake a jaded desperation best illustrated by the slogan buttons  she wore pinned to a girl-scout sash 'practical', 'sensible', 'settle' and at the very top 'compromise'. 

She pretended she was past all that now. Older and wiser, experienced enough to no longer relish the infantile - and decidedly unfeminist notion - of a saviour to rescue her from her hollow cries of independence or her carefully cultivated status quo titled "self reliance".

There were fleeting moments when she felt that being a woman was perhaps the worst possible curse and others where she praised herself for being evolved enough to keep men in their rightful place: wanting. Still, she sifted through the scores of men who now appropriately pretended to care about the words coming out of her mind while simultaneously praying for them to give way to drunken demands of hasty one-night stands. Something they could both forget in the morning. She, so that there was an excuse for her own weakness and they, so that they could move on to a far less convoluted subject. 

She belonged to an odd, angry generation forever pretending to hate the men who kept trying to shackle her kind, while finding herself incapable of dismissing them completely. It was an ugly, sordid, bitter pill to swallow. But she still found herself seated at yet another bar stool, next to yet another man pretending to be enthralled by her treatise on Tchaikovsky; forcing conversation on the most recent death-toll in Gaza, all the while wondering if her breasts were larger than his ex-girl friend's and whether she was prone to screaming bloody murder during sex. 

It had gotten to the point where no one could remember who switched on the music for this moribund session of musical chairs, where no one ever won but everyone got laid. Perhaps it was better when there were good night kisses to be had and wedding vows to bind, she thought but dismissed the idea immediately. The only difference there was that the music was perceptibly slower. Was that where they now stood, perched on a pedestal overlooking a colossal  answer that rested on whether women preferred acapella and  blues to rap and techno?

She first had sex when she was thirteen and during the proceedings she managed to compose an entire sonata staring at a spider's web on her third-period lab partner's ceiling. She could no longer count the number of eyes she had gazed into while looking for that one pair that made searching worth it. It'd been twenty years since she started and she was still waiting for the music to stop. 

For that pair of eyes. 
For that first kiss. 

The scariest thought of all was that she might not recognize it when it came...if.