Tilt-a-Whirl

Love is a carnival ride: the Tilt-a-Whirl. You walk, feet ringing on the metal up-and-down platform, clutching hands and searching for an empty car. The red- and blue-enameled steel clamshell opens wide for your pleasure. You climb in together, slide over the naugahyde seat and pull down the chrome restraining bar. All aboard, and the big machine groans into action, tentatively at first, the clamshell rising and falling, quarter turning left and right. You look at one another and hope for the best. The pace picks up and you lean with the spin until, thrown against one another, everything becomes a matter of physical proximity and centrifugal force. Then you’re in it all the way, whirling, spinning, laughing, screaming, all hands gripping the bar as bodies lurch and collide; and it’s really love, the whole dizzying, awkward dance of it. No one else exists but you two in the mechanical clamshell, reeling past the carnival lights, a black sky full of stars, and a blurred quarter moon.

Quick as it starts, the iron beast creaks to a halt. Heads full of vertigo, you stagger around the walkway and down the stairs into the grass, and you have to choose: Do we walk this way together, past the barkers and the suckers queuing up for another shot at the ring toss, past the hotdog vendors, the merry-go-round, the house of horrors, the ferris wheel, the tunnel of love, into the parking lot and the pine scented air of reality, or do we stagger on, pretending the real world is nothing more than a strip of cheap ride tickets, drunkenly lurching from one silly amusement to another?

This was howled on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 11:33 pm and is part of the Uncategorized genus. You can follow responses to this howl through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.