Brunch
He knocked back the next glass of sparkling wine and put the empty leaded crystal flute on the table. The bearded gentleman was still droning on about his Volkswagen bus. He looked around the room. Two distinct groups had formed, and they didn’t appear to be interested in co-mingling. They were all here for the same person, but had seemed to self-organize based on how they knew her. Work friends in the corner around the couch, friends from her hometown around the glass table. He found himself with the hometown friends around the table, although he didn’t belong.
He had only been here twenty minutes and already he wanted to leave. He didn’t quite understand why he felt this way, and wanted to make sure that his mood did not affect the party. He felt like an empty husk, like opening his mouth to utter even a single word would deplete him of his dwindling energy reserves and cause him to pass out. It was a nice enough affair, complete with finger food, cake, copious amounts of sparkling wine, coffee, and orange juice.
There was music playing at a comfortable volume: not so quiet as to leave the room feeling bare, but not so loud as to force people to converse by shouting back and forth. Yet he still wanted to leave. To be alone, to be anywhere but here. Here, with the bearded man going on about his bus, the bespectacled kindergarten teacher about her Christmas party, and the woman for whom they were all there, opening her presents, feigning excitement. It was too much and somehow far too little at the same time.
Usually, if he felt like this, he either proceeded to drink enough so that the suffocating feeling faded into the background, or slipped out of the social gathering without being noticed. Neither strategy would help him today, as he didn’t feel like getting day drunk, and the party was too small to leave without drawing unwanted attention. It didn’t help that there was an almost constant stream of smokers going in and out of the apartment through the balcony door, allowing the frigid air from outside to gush nearly uninhibited into the woman’s small living room in which they were all confined. He thought it odd that they attempted to close the door at all. Why not just keep it open?
He realized he had tuned out the bearded gentleman from before, and forced himself to tune in to see if he had missed any key details or something interesting. Nope. Amazingly still rambling on. The bearded man–wearing a skater hoodie a size too small ostensibly from his glory days failing to land ollies–was talking about how a mechanic had apparently fucked something up the last time his bus had been in the shop.
He tuned back out and snuck a clandestine glance at the work friends’ territory around the couch. Apparently one of them had just told a joke, as they were all laughing loudly. Too loudly. The kind of laugh that one makes when a joke is devoid of humor but everyone wants to be part of the group so they laugh. He debated wandering over and listening in, but couldn’t bring himself to move from the good-looking-but-impractical bench he was sitting on.
In a way, he felt bad. He felt like he was passing judgment on these people he barely knew. Or it could perhaps be interpreted that way. This wasn’t the case. If anything, he was simply exhausted by such gatherings, where the same topics of conversation were rehashed, the same fake laughs were forced through smiling mouths and sad eyes, and the same jostling of social status was carried out. Who were the doctors and lawyers in the room? Who had the most adventurous job? Who lived in the most expensive area of town? Who had the trendiest surface-level political views?
He made sure to keep a slight smile emblazoned on his face the entire time, just large enough to ward off any questions about how he was really feeling. In fact, he hoped nobody would talk to him at all. His only goal was to get through the gathering without drawing attention to himself. In this sense, he was happy that the bearded man continued to bloviate about the travails and burdens of possessing a Volkswagen bus. He only hoped that when the man stopped talking, another person would immediately begin, so he wouldn’t have to say anything that would inevitably be disappointing. It was a party, after all.