At The Reunion

And just like that,
the sound went off.
As if someone had suddenly flipped a switch,
the entire room went silent before my eyes.
It was a gift.
Someone owed me a favor,
and plucked me from the flames
that my mind had created in subsequent moments.
The young men and women, all geared up
in their weekend outfits, casually went about
their business as if nothing had changed.
The room was full of sex hungry early twenty-something suburbanites who seemingly
all knew each other.
They were a friend of a friend of a friend,
or a childhood neighbor,
or a former class mate,
or a crazy ex-significant other,
or a regretful one night stand
that you tried so desperately to avoid
as you hid in a dim corner by the juke box.
They were my hometown.
They were every city that I will never see.
They were the reason television,
and anti-depressants were created.
The were America's brave war pawns.
They were future divorces,
middle-class, suicidal, dead-beat parents
who would breed a new kind of terrorist
with every conceived child.
I watched them smile and embrace each other
and talk about their memories of their sterile
and pampered upbringing.
The tanned and obnoxious young women
laughed, and smoked menthol cigarettes,
and checked their cell phones every five minutes.
The young men, with their gelled hair,
and pristine clothing ordered beer after beer,
as their unrelenting quests to destroy brain cells,
and get laid forged on for one more night.
I stared directly at their faces
while they laughed, and hollered
and still; not a sound
over the white noise.
My brain rattled as my heart pounded like a timpani;
hot blood surging through my head
like a molten landslide.
Of all my problems,
I thought,
at least I never became one of them.
I now understood why I was born with
my mother's spiteful outlook
and deceptive tongue.
And for the first time in my entire life
I was proud to be one of her many mistakes.
I sat and stared for a while
before I had my fill and left.
for one beautiful night,
I was not the enemy.