It Was Me
Last October, as has been the case, the weather was weird, and it stayed warm late into the month, the weekend before Halloween it was still warm, and his neighbor was having a party. Things were still good then, I wasn’t too crazy yet, I could still spend time with him, it could be just the two of us, and I didn’t have to worry what it meant, or what it didn’t mean, what it could or couldn’t mean, because I knew what it meant to me, and that was important — but then maybe that was the problem.
He’d invited me, which warmed me. He hadn’t invited anyone else, any of his other friends, as far as I knew — though likely he had and I was just the one who showed. I usually am.
There were people there, of course. I’d never met them, any of them, except the host and his companion, but I didn’t know them well. I’m awkward at parties if I don’t know at least half the people there. If I’m not in the company of the person I came with or the people I know, I end up making dumb conversation with strangers where I feel like I’m unable to adequately express myself on even the most direct and banal issues: How are you? What’s your name? Did you grow up around here? What do you do? First meetings are hard and all my words leave. I know a lot of people feel this way. But I did okay, as I recall. Things were good then, as I said, but maybe they weren’t, because I was still desperate to impress him, to act right, to show him he could bring me to parties and leave me at the wet bar with a pimply undergraduate I didn’t know and I could talk to the undergraduate and make jokes, mix my own drink, I didn’t have to follow at his heel or hang on his arm, I didn’t have to constantly flick my eyes around the room, trying to get him in my sight. That had been an issue before, though we didn’t talk about it, at another party, where I’d known many people and had felt very comfortable but couldn’t seem to detach myself from his presence. I felt like I was following him into the various rooms and out to smoke cigarettes because I was, I was consciously aware that I was, and of his growing irritation, and at one point we were in the kitchen with many other people, and he was leaning against the sink, and I was on the other side of the room — or maybe it was that I had just come into the room, in which case I would have been apart from him, in which case I would have been looking for him, so it adds up — and I went to stand next to him, I leaned against the sink too, and it was as if the force of my body leaning against the counter propelled his body away from it at the exact moment, and he moved away from me, and I felt like when a potato chip gets lodged in your throat and you choke for a few panicked seconds. I’d left that party early, I’d left my roommate there. Someone gave her a ride home. When I left he was flirting with her in the living room. A few days later he texted me something that was meant to express his frustration over “those girls” not having the time of day to give him. I didn’t tell him then that I had all the time, any day, every day, and he could have it, or anything even to the effect, and maybe I should have, though I’m trying to accept that the problem was never of a chronological nature, which is hard, even though one can’t do anything about chronology, either.
But I was good at his neighbor’s party. I chatted with the pimply undergraduate about the school he was attending, because I was taking a Spanish class there and was familiar with the campus and some of its politics. I made small talk with a middle aged couple I took to be husband and wife, though maybe they weren’t. I don’t remember if they were wearing wedding rings. When he was around I think I was able to conceal the electricity that always sparked like Sparklers down my spine. Whenever he walked away I acted like he was walking away, not like he was walking away from me.
Later that night there was a costume party at a downtown bar we like, everyone likes, though obviously many people probably do not like it. I once wrote a blog post about that bar, actually, because once when I was there a straight guy was “actively homophobic” to me in the bathroom, and I guess I said some things about the bar in the blog post that some people who ended up reading it (which, like how? it was a shitty wordpress blog and that was honestly like the second post) tried to argue with me in the comments and eventually I took it down because even though I didn’t care what some oldass South Bend bar people thought about me I did like going to that bar, a lot of my friends went there, though I did wait a long time before going back again.
We were going to go to the costume party. I was going to go as a mail carrier, because my stepfather is a mail carrier and I could just wear one of his shirts and a hat, and actually I did look pretty cute, IMO, a week later, when I wore it to a different party with a different friend (where I didn’t know anyone else):
The roommate whom I had left at the other party who wasn’t my roommate anymore by Halloween but with whom I was still technically friends and who had incidentally moved across the street from him was going to the costume party, she was the one who told me about it, and I told her I’d go after the party at his neighbor’s because I’d already committed to that, and maybe he’d come too, though I was never in the business of making his plans for him. But after the party at his neighbor’s we just went up to his apartment and lay down on his bed and watched an animated movie for a while. We were both pretty drunk but we drank more and we kept taking hits from his bowl and his bed is really comfortable, not only when he’s in it, and I remember thinking at one point Fuck a costume party. I don’t remember if my phone died or if that’s just what I told my roommate who wasn’t my roommate anymore by then. Later she said she’d gone to his door and knocked and rang the bell but neither he nor I heard either of those things, and even though it was pretty early, because we were kind of drunk we both fell asleep. We woke up again at like three or four AM but by then the bar was closed so we just smoked some more and put on something else to watch — the DVD menu for whatever he’d put on earlier was playing on loop — and I was glad we’d missed the party and glad at the thought of my old roommate with whom he’d been flirting at the other party knocking on his door and ringing his bell, knowing we were there, and neither of us hearing her, and, maliciously, though I didn’t feel it in a malicious place, glad to think of her going on to the bar without us. We didn’t do anything that night, I mean we didn’t fuck or anything, but when we were falling asleep the second time he did put his arm around me, which I really liked a lot, but maybe that was accidental, an unconscious movement of his sleep, or maybe it was me, maybe I put his arm across me while he slept.
