how to party

tolstoy and charli xcx both talked about this

A party is a sacred place for getting what you want. A hangover, a fleeting obsession, the last word.

In a crowded noise-packed room, there’s those who need me and those who don’t yet know they do. The former is a pity case, the latter an excuse to offer myself as a canvas. So I do. I stare, I eavesdrop, I’m soft and easy to confide in, I make room, live through the worst of it. I make it known that I’m a watcher with a rock hard memory and a spacious mind, a real flaneur armed with smudged eyeliner and all the time in the world.

And then there’s you, my party favor. Noticing the corners of your mouth dance upward to the racket of your sweaty, restless friends and their stories, Katherine who’s friends with Dylan who’s somewhat friends with Danny who went to grad school with Bart all taking turns to entertain you. It’s crowded and I’m losing focus, trying to ration out my staring so I’m not giving dignity away. If I knew you better than a stranger, maybe I could entertain you, too.

I’ve been so many things tonight: the learner and the impostor, the prophet and the lighter hoarder, the fallen to frisky compliments soldier and the joke dispenser. What I haven’t been is the object of your attention. Good thing I’ve got enough fixation force for the both of us. Another drink and I’ll be leaving. Another drink and we could recreate The Piano Teacher.

la pianiste (2001)

The most sophisticated thing about a party is it requires nothing from its guests. It leeches off promise, never probability. You’re everyone and no one, it’s your word against the infinite. Reinvent yourself, pick something to embody. Maybe you’re 22 and just moved here from São Paulo. You could be freshly 30 and in love with your Bushwick ex as you failed to make long distance technically ethical non-monogamy work. You’re engaged to a guy with a dachshund and a mortgage in Oud-West. You’re 40 and overaccomplished, out of place among the twentysomethings. Everyone is passing through with a story of their own and sheer hope. To them, I am an airport layover and an empathetic ear in a prayer room, their pick-me-up from a vending machine, a terminal to offload their doubts and drunken shortcuts and confessions to be washed away with next week’s laundry.

Real yearners go to parties with an ambitious goal to get our feelings hurt. It’s far from challenging: I needed a spectacle under this roof tonight, like a firework show or the Colosseum, so I made you into one. Fixating on a stranger is a walk in the park — pick someone handsome, then burn holes in the back of their skull to feel as if you’ve been acquainted forever.

It’s not that I let my daydreaming climb high, this slow, delicious projection, tracing craters in your moonlight, but the more you reveal about yourself, the more it clashes with the altar I’d built for us. I noticed you’re a lousy host, for instance: there’s people cornered into the nooks of your living room snorting lines off uneven, dusty surfaces, and you couldn’t offer them the privacy of your bathroom. Every good host knows there should be space for white powder rituals and for falling desperately in love, and no, the two cannot overlap.

But perhaps I need you sly and lousy with all your flaws out in the open, so when we finally kiss I won’t have to lose my mind about it. Knowledge is power, they say. Knowledge is also sanity, and sanity is boring, and I hate boring, and boring clings to me like dirt to white sneakers. I want and fear your affection in equal measure.

The assumption that it’s reciprocity I’m after is the offensive part. I’m only swimming in the electromagnetic field of a forbidden narrative, no more, no less. I’m here to watch, remember? I’m already the centerpiece and really don’t need more loving or somebody to take me home. A body sees another body in its vicinity and wants to clash against it, there’s nothing to be shamed for. Annie Ernaux wrote “I do not wish to explain my passion — that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify — I just want to describe it.” I wanna hear it, transcribe it, sketch it out, write it down, tear the page, put it in my mouth, spit it out, repeat.

It must’ve been around cigarette number fifteen and a hundred hey-how-are-you’s later that something in my field tilts forward and sends a wave of nauseating electricity down to my waistline. Lost signal in a hollow body, a sixth sense, like when you know the TV is on before you walk into the room.

It’s you. It’s your hand on my shoulder. Everything’s a rupture now, a zipper come undone, knife cutting through the humming. As though you knew I’ve been hungry for you and obvious in knowledge. You’ve hacked my system, gotten to the source code, short circuited me into a critical malfunction, my perfect track record of every calculated move. Demolished. Wiped the senses clean, I don’t know where I am, who I’ve been, if I’m going anywhere, where my lighter is, can barely speak, untouchable no longer. You’re crushing the fourth wall, mind reader, you should be proud. Nobody’s allowed. I realize I’m not the undercover eye guard of the room. I’m being watched, too.

Spinning out. It’s weighing down on me, warmth breaking through conniving strides and slow seduction. No longer in control because this party is a little death. It’s all sinking to the bottom of the clogged sink, awaking from a hazy dream: how rough it’s been on my sore feet to stand here awkwardly all night, how I looked your way ten thousand times, naive and perverted in my secrecy, the weed stench in my hair, how tight my clothes feel on my body and not in a sexy way, the sticky wooden floors. Your fault, because you got away with bursting the bubble of my private space, and now all there’s left to do is gasp for air on lost man’s territory.

“Doing alright here?”

Ripping the monologue apart to make room for conversation. Kind eyes, twisted tone, hand still on my shoulder like a honey bee, twenty seconds and counting, can’t be angry about any of it. You and I are nothing like them — and I know what you know by the generosity of your gaze, granting me permission to stare some more, to think the unthinkable, to leave small talk to the bystanders, to stretch my arms to where they shouldn’t be, under your sweater maybe, to live, to die for it. What is the difference between a crowded room and a miracle? One is a backdrop for the other. I find you in both.

***

As I walk home, my head clings to every direction my feet refuse to take me. A night is as special as you make it. I went to a party, it meant something. Big deal, you’re saying? Every flaneur knows nothing too loud and in-your-face is worth keeping your eyes on. Why go somewhere at all if not to get your hopes up and heart shattered? To return home lingering with rum, flirtatious remarks, gluttony? Something was born there when we locked eyes, then something died there with the last guest. It won’t matter tomorrow, and it will matter for the rest of my life. Retreating back to mind games, head to pillow, the best things are left unsaid, I’m right back where I started, and every brushstroke of embarrassment sits quietly on the windowpane come morning dew.

“I’ve fallen in love or imagine that I have; went to a party and lost my head” Tolstoy notes in his journal on January 25th, 1851, on the account of an afterglow buzz. 169 years later, Charli xcx releases party 4 u, a sultry hoping-longing-waiting for a guy who won’t show up in true Fitzgerald fashion track. It’s all dancing everywhere, glitter and ballroom gowns, uppers and downers, falling for familiar strangers, breaking apart, losing your mind and control through the noise, a party is a language where unity is friction, and nothing really stays for long but everybody loves you.

We’ve been doing this forever, haven’t we? Go to a party, make it hurt.