Liverpool

I Never Knew Their Name…

…but I knew what it felt like to dance with him. 

Sometimes, especially when you travel solo, you hit low points that make you wish you were safe at home. You find yourself buying a triple vodka lemonade on the third floor of a Liverpool club and pouring it down your throat, hoping to escape the moment. That’s where I ended up one Saturday night in January. 

I had fallen deep into a summer romance seven months earlier on the beach in Barcelona. I was infatuated with him, and him with me. He was British, I was from California, but all we wanted was to see each other again. I believed I could visit him at his University over break and the sparks that flew in Barcelona would ignite again in England.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. So there I was, 5,000 miles from home, celebrating his mate’s 21st birthday at a club in Liverpool while he was off (as the Brits would say) snogging his new girlfriend that he met on Tinder a month earlier. 

I was shattered, at a low point. My self esteem was gone, and I didn’t know a soul in that city to seek for refuge. I was desperately trying to salvage a night where all I wanted to do was lay in bed back home in California. Vodka seemed like the only answer. 

Then a stranger caught my eye. 

Blame it on the Boogie by the Jackson Five came on in the club, and I loved it. Somehow I had gone my whole life without hearing this song, but when you are drunk and heartbroken its a bit of a fixer. That’s when he came into my life. 

He was dancing in the most carefree way. Old fashioned moves with his shirt unbuttoned and something illegible written on his forehead, half smudged off. We began dancing in that old fashioned, laughing around kind of way. To this day, he remains the best dance partner Ive ever had. Between asking me to dance and spinning me around the dance floor (we took up a good fifteen feet with our twirling and shuffling and spinning), I had forgotten my sadness. His grin was infectious. He kissed away my tears and made me laugh with his no shame boogie. It seemed like the song would never end. I wish it never did. 

I’m sure at some point we had exchanged a conversation. But whether it was the alcohol, the noise of the club, or the spinning on the dance floor, I never learned his name. 

We ended up being parted by the crowd after just one dance, and I never saw him again. But this stranger, in under four minutes, mended my broken heart. So, to the boy I may never see again, thank you for the dance. For the rest of my life I’ll hear that song and think of you. I hope you’ll think of me.