Party

             I’m late for a party because it fell on a Sunday Morning and when I arrive it’s in a hotel banquet room and everyone is already there, holding drinks, talking to each other, and freezing to stare when I come in. Sorry, I say, taking off my wet coat and when I look out the window it’s all blue water that looks like twilight sky and we’re submerged but breathing. Then I have to go mingle because music is playing, the room is placid and even though I think I feel at home it isn’t silent like my home, the tone is social, mutedly buzzing.

             I go to Katy standing in the middle, who said it didn’t hurt to come but she won’t tell me how she got there. It was perfect, she says, her calm eyes changing colors, green to blue and back, her nose freckled, drinking water instead of wine. She shrugs like it’s simple, a well-kept simple secret, with the right person it can be perfect.

             I walk to Zoe who is pale but born so defiant without a doubt who said it was all or nothing, like I’d once declared, the second self soul mate of pre-teen dreams or the stranger who can be forgotten, so that the inevitable trauma can fall away into a fact without a face. She decided it best for her life to just start and for it to go on alone so she swallowed a bottle of something in Union Square and kissed the first drug dealer she saw. He was Ecuadorian and that’s all she knew and after that she never wanted to stop. I’m here but I never come, she says.

             There’s my Lola, by the window, who was all lust but so young and played a cell phone tag game with a very flesh and blood boy we all knew was all danger and we said so, too. He had a hollow mask face and waited for her to coy herself into submission. Another dealer but in the suburbs, the son of the wealthy and she couldn’t bargain like Carly could because she thought too hard about it and felt too hard about it and the next thing she knew, she was in their basement on a suede couch and it wasn’t planned as a movie about the Mafia played on and gunshots were heard. He told me it was my fault, she yells to me but no one in the room seems startled by her noise or even looks our way.

             And then to Amy at the bar with her long black hair looking like a doll and she was at a college famed for Great Women, drunk on French and Poetry and Cambridge and Whiskey like they all were, and one night the Harvard boys came and before she could remember it was Halloween, they were in costumes, and she was in her roommate’s bed with Peter Pan whose real name she’d never found out. I don’t regret it, she reminds herself to me.

             I see little Rachel, the sweet one of all, who liked first and after it all came love and it was a night when the fire alarms went off at Three AM and they waited by the rocks in the dark while the firemen loped past, real men she should have stopped, thrown against, called after but her boy in his tweed and corduroy was coming off coke because he liked to be able to say he did it and she was winding down drunk because she liked an excuse to dance and they went back inside and uncertain of the labels of their coupling got back on his tobacco littered mattress and it was all so good before he felt ashamed. I just liked when he said my name, she mumbles.

             Katy and Lola came early if not right on time, according to the magazines I read; Zoe and Amy and Rachel came later, fashionably late, late enough for the others to grin at them wisely. I’m late and I wasn’t invited, I realize, even though I like the smooth beige carpet and the water so deep outside the window and all of my friends smiling and relieved to see me. I like it but I wasn’t supposed to be there, there had been no invitation and I had no story to tell. I am sorry for myself because yet again I’ve intruded and I’m clumsy and I’m the little kid who brings the handful of grass to show and tell, but I’m more sorry for them all, even the smug ones, and all the sad ones, because they were trying to be people but they were trapped underwater like fish.

             I went into another room and it was a kitchen and there was a boy standing, there weren’t boys here, boys were outside land animals not welcome in the hotel on this day; my eyebrows rose, and it was Him. It was the tall one with the golden hair, skin, and eyes I’d asked all the women outside about. He rubs my knee with his hand underneath the table when we sit together and now finally I know he wants me but now I also know he is ordinary and all the gold glinting off of him is just sun kissed hair and healthy flesh and a lucky dose of good DNA and that just won’t do anymore; I need valiance, I don’t need choice, I need a statue.

M.J. is a writer based in New York City. Her most recent work can be found in The Brooklyn Rail and Killing the Buddha, and her crazy life can be read about on mjwriting.tumblr.com.