10/31/15
We'd been in the same room once, at a music club in the basement of a Chinese restaurant, where a tribute show for some it-band was being held until well into what was called the "vulnerable hours" in a book I'd read.
It sounds cooler than it was.
I turned twenty-one that night, staring at my dying phone in the middle of a raging song. I watched the numbers change on the clock portion of my lockscreen. And at midnight on Halloween, for a moment, I was the only one who knew.
It was a strange feeling—I'd spent many newly-minted birthdays alone before, but never in a room full of people. I tried sensing a certain change, any change, within me, but I was as unremarkable and still as ever. I downed some of my beer (it was horrible and I hated it and I probably wasn't built for drinking of any sort) and tried to focus on the musicians on the makeshift stage, their faces half-hidden in the dimness. I felt out of place, like I always did, because everyone seemed to know everybody else but me.
But you were there, and you were a sight, with your cellophane eyes and your unruly hair, and I just knew I would never see you again. You were one of them, of course; you fit in.
I slipped away and left halfway through the show, already the slightest bit irrationally sad that I was losing you, a total stranger. I spent the rest of the night slowly finishing off the cheap caramel cake my parents had gotten me from the local bakery and wondering if I'd ever been truly drunk before.
(I probably have, once. I found out I was the space-out kind; lots of unfocused distant stares, speaking less and sinking even deeper into my head.)
I wasn't then, I don't think. But I was something.
