Shame, Shame
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
It took a night like that one.
I have a friendship with a particular person that is as powerful as it is fragile. This contradiction, in fact, may even be the reason why we get along so fucking swimmingly in the first place. He has his own social sphere in which he thrives very naturally, and I have mine, and when we meet up, a special setting surfaces for us to bounce around in—seemingly impenetrable and substantially indifferent to our differences, especially when it comes to who we are publicly. A tit for tat deal, really. I am nothing like his other friends and he is nothing like mine, and I would like to think we each complement our personalities in a way nobody else can, hence the great value we place in our friendship. (Vague, much? Well, what can you do.)
Having said this, it is thus very difficult—maybe impossible—to introduce each other to our respective home turfs. It had always been understood between us that if we were to take each other to places we as individuals usually go to, were to let each other hang out with our other friends, were to show each other who we technically are as social beings, the one who’d be subject to the different environment was bound to break out in hives.
Last night was an attempt to challenge this curse, with me as the inductee into a strange new world (a club/café at a high-end district, basically), but it just didn’t work. I kept an open mind, I did. Hyped myself up, put on a chirpy, devil-may-care disposition. But I still cared. Or, rather, couldn’t care less about the great mass of pretty people I was idling on the fringes of, couldn’t care less about their version of nightlife—one in which you couldn’t really sit still and talk decently, in which a drink or five was absolutely imperative to appreciate each other, in which chaos was king. Not to say that I don’t like noise. I do. Very much so. But it is still a different cacophony I crave.
Okay, I’ll say it. I don’t like having to be brainless to party. I don’t like having to shout into people’s ears to give piddling commentary. I don’t like needing to be intimidatingly gorgeous to look like I belong even remotely. I don’t like having to prove to others that I’m ridiculously hot and you are sooooo freaking not. So I told my friend that I was going to leave. Shouted into his ear that I just wasn’t feeling it. He understood.
Am I being insecure? Immature? I don’t know. But I felt like pure shit last night. Like a troll. Like no single sliver of my body nor speck of my personality was worthy of registering in that room. That I can say for certain. And it was such an unnecessary feeling.
My friend and I met up again this afternoon, had lunch and coffee at our usual dive. We were okay. Still, there was a certain muck lining our meeting that we just couldn’t ignore, one quite possibly of embarrassment. On both our ends.
Dear god. There is surely something to be said here about caution.
posted by marguerite @ 1:31 AM
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