I suffer plenty when I arrive at social gatherings on my own. There’s something about being watched as I cross a doorway holding a twelve-pack that makes me feel vulnerable. Every drop of attention focused on you like you’re the night’s guest on Kimmel. It’s all of them against little just me. Maybe that’s why I like to be early. It’s like dipping into the hot tub as it warms instead of cautiously and gradually submerging every part of your body when it’s already boiling.
When you come in a group the attention is divided. If you’re as wise as I am, you’ll open the door for others so they’ll come in before you do. You let them greet everyone while you head to where all the drinks are with a “Where can I put this?”, holding up your twelve-pack of Whiteclaws, evidently the “this” you referred to because, well, you’re holding it up.
You pretend you’re focused on emptying the twelve-pack into a cooler for a few minutes, at the end of which you’ve been there long enough for someone to come up and talk to you. It gives you an excuse to avoid greeting everyone who was already there saying “Sorry, I got distracted talking to Johnny here” if any of them dare accuse you of being impolite.
When I was even younger and I had to rely on my parents to drive me to parties, my stomach would knot through the 20-minute car rides to wherever I was being dropped off. My body understood it was about to go straight from being with my mom, the original source of unconditional love, to the gladiatorial coliseum that a teenage reunion is, where “unconditional judgment” was first observed. I’ll tell you now, there is no creature crueler than a medium hormonal human, except perhaps an even younger child who has yet to suffer and has not yet begun to empathize.
Then they invented the pre-game. Or maybe it already existed, but I wasn’t drinking yet back then. The point is they now let you catch a buzz before you get to the party, so you go through all the suffering and social anxiety the day after rather than during the event. Everyone will like you better if you arrive with a couple of drinks in you
In the beginning, all conversation is superficial, and the drinks, on which you can still taste the alcohol, are thicker than water. That doesn’t mean that one of several countdowns hasn’t started yet. You know you brought 12 cans, but every time you go back to the cooler there’ll be less than you left last time. You’re racing the universally acknowledged evil of “I didn’t bring anything to drink, but I assume the contents of the cooler are public property, right?” What do you do? Will you drink quickly to ensure you get as much bang for your buck? Or do you pace yourself so the next day you can remember all the dumb shit you will inevitably spew?
Like that countdown there are others. Will there be enough time for your Karaoke pick to come up? Will there be enough time for you to naturally end up talking to a person you owe an honest conversation to? Will there be enough time so that, when someone stays quiet, you arm yourself with courage and decide to be vulnerable, unloading what you’ve been carrying for some time? Will there be enough time so that when everyone around you starts succumbing to their more primitive impulses, you happen to be in the right place with the right person and they too give in to their own primitive impulses? Or will what always happens happen, where you end up alone and become a spectator in your own life?
I just try to banish all inhibition as quickly as I can, not because I don’t care what happens, but because while I possess that disinhibition, the things that happen will not matter.
I don’t go to parties to drink. A while ago I understood that there is a hierarchy of importance to the things in life. There’s breathing, nourishment, engineering, and all of those things Robin Williams claimed are important to surviving in that movie where a young poet dies. Then there are the things that make us want to keep living, right? Art, music, poetry, and women. People. The only thing that ever truly matters. That’s what I go for. To unearth as much humanity in other people, hoping some of that humanity will rub off and rekindle the numbed humanity in me.
The main obstacle in that, the matriarch of all of my aspirations, is that which humanity quite stupidly imposed on itself. The concept of etiquette and social constructs. You can’t just ask whatever you want and express whatever you feel. You must beat around the bush, imply, indirectly suggest, and test waters that could very easily be plunged into. You simply must not ask for what you need or want. That’s too expensive, too risky. We’ve made some progress, at least we now find therapy somewhat acceptable, but that also takes up your time and money. If you drink enough, mind you, those expressions and confessions can be bought through debt acquisition. Even then, there will be interest to pay in the months and years to come. “I’ll take the bill and two cops”, as my dad never fails to say when eating out.
As the number of cans in the cooler decreases, anguish builds up in me that I cannot seem to evict. “This will end”. Just like life. “Life and parties”. An easy pair for an existentialist like myself to analogize. Time moves on too swiftly, intent on leaving me behind. Before I ––
Sorry, I got distracted by this straight-up banger that just popped up in the playlist I am listening to.
Before I satiate my hunger for the consumption of the various interesting personalities that surround me, I start to feel the beginning of the end. To be clear, this soireé started ending as soon as it began, but the point is that now I’ve begun to notice. It’s still early, but the party is beautiful precisely because it is short. You’ll be there for four or five hours, at the most.
Four or five hours seem insufficient. They’re not enough for corporations, they demand eight from you a day. They’re not enough for a flight from Monterrey to Seattle. That’ll take all damn day.
Turns out four or five hours are enough for most of the things that matter. They’re enough to develop the foundation of a friendship that will last a lifetime with a person you just met. They’re enough for you to fuck up a cherished friendship that you’ve had for a lifetime that you will go on cherishing, now bitterly, because it will cease to cherish you back. I’ve gone through this enough times, it’s not surprising I am horrified by the prospect.
Four or five hours are enough for a man to fall in love with a woman that will never love him back. They’re enough for a woman that the man will never think of again to fall in love with said man, who will also never find out. They’re enough for you to have the best night of your life and then spend the next seventy years foundationally enraged about the fact that you will never experience such unbridled joy again. Such completeness. Such a feeling of being accompanied.
In the end, four or five hours are still, also, not enough. They just won’t do. They will not fill. They will not apologize. They will leave you wanting more. Others don’t get it. They say “I want to go home, bye, see ya”. Like they’re sure we’ll see each other again. Like the good could ever last as long as the bad. As if shooting stars appeared in the sky forever and the ends of the world weren’t as absolute and eternal. Some of them have someone waiting for them at home. Being there, with them, is better than being here, with you. Some of them are fine on their own. Being there, on their own, is not very different from being here, with you. I’m not some of them. I never have been. It’s always been me, separate from them. Them against me. Them wanting to leave, and me wishing they’d stay a little bit longer, maybe forever, as long as they don’t get in my way. And I stay until I can’t stay anymore. It’s why I’m always the last one to leave a party.
I think about leaving. Getting in an uber for five minutes at 3 am, getting home, laying down, and staring at the darkness where the ceiling is supposed to be for a couple of hours. A couple of hours where there is nothing but the deafening sound of my own thoughts. Thoughts that I grew accustomed to having many a moon ago, which I cannot escape and, to be honest, don’t think I could survive losing. My thoughts are the only ones keeping me any kind of company, no matter how bad. They’ve been with me since I was happy because I didn’t yet know how much loneliness could grow, how much pain and how much sorrow there was in the lives of others and my own being. So much to want that I cannot have, so much to have had that I was stupid enough to lose. So much to regret. So much to fear and so much fear to overcome. For a moment, a very very fleeting moment, I understand. Loneliness is too heavy a burden to carry alone.
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