Beneath a veil of golden light, the crowd swayed. The exchange of smiles and conversation was punctuated arrhythmically by the chime of laughter and wine glasses. It was unintelligible. Their bodies blurred together like the shadows of shifting leaves, and whatever words they shared were drowned amidst the simultaneous utterances of a dozen others. It was chaos, so it seemed, and yet the effortlessness of their levity glimmered brilliantly through my muddled perception. I could not understand the calculus—I never had—but one need not know every undulating shape of the ocean’s endless surface to glimpse the beauty of the moonlight that trembles upon it. Thus did they drift from place to place, from person to person, from group to group, ripples scattering across ripples, fluent in that voiceless tongue whose timbre I would never hear. I stood deaf upon that shadowed shore, but I was not blind to my estrangement.
I held a glass in my hands. There was water in it, but now it was empty, and I did not know what to do with it. Placing it frivolously upon some vacant surface struck me as rude, and yet as I glanced around the golden room, I saw a menagerie of abandoned stemware. Some were empty while others remained half-filled with wed wine or honey-hued champagne. I supposed then that I could set my own glass anywhere, but I was not confident that I had not missed some essential rule known to all but myself, as I so often did, and so instead I did nothing. The scent of alcohol in the air made me nauseous.
I did not know what to do with myself. In the dark room I stood in, beside a glass window that stretched from the floor to the ceiling, there was a chair. I went to it quietly and sat, placing the glass between my feet. I would move it later, but now I turned away, toward the hazy lights of the city below. With the brighter light pouring in from the adjacent room, I could only see clearly when I looked through my shadow. Below me, there were rows of headlights that moved in a procession against the crimson beside them; there were illegible lettered signs and amber-lit offices; there were scattered grey clouds and signs of snowfall; and beneath it all, amidst it all, the streets swayed with a procession of purposed shadows. Mine was there too, in a sense, but as I shifted in my seat again, the light behind me fell unobstructed and burned it away.
Someone, stepping away from the crowd, entered the room. She did not notice me as she approached the table where a pitcher of chilled water glistened with sweat. She filled her glass, then took a small, tentative sip as if to test its temperature. The action was idiosyncratic, humanizing. I felt affection for her, and suddenly a childish hope stirred within me that this stranger would take notice of my presence and we could talk about our shared, inane choice of drink, or anything at all, in truth. I watched her turn to rejoin the others, and our eyes met briefly. The fear that held me loosened. I was compelled to speak, but before any sound could escape my lips, her gaze had passed me over, and she stepped back into the light.
The thought came unbidden: “I don’t belong here.” This was not an indulgence of self-pity as much as it was a recognition of a fundamental truth. My presence was little more than a haunting, and so I stood from the chair and went wordlessly to the elevator.
The drive home was dull. I thought of very little, and it began to snow. I remember nothing else of it.
I stepped out of my car and into the cold. I watched my misty breath until the headlights dimmed, and I began toward the door. I do not know why it struck me then, perhaps it was the finality of the fading of that light, but the silhouette of that stranger flickered in my mind. I saw her sip her water. I saw the look in her eyes as they met mine. I did not know what emotion lied there—was it disgust?—but the instant the question formed in my mind, I was overcome with shame. What gave me the right to observe as I did? Why should I think to be spoken to when I was too much of a coward to speak to anyone myself? Did my self-imposed isolation gratify some masochistic, voyeuristic impulse? Maybe I desired the dull agony of the loneliness I felt—it made me tragic.
Ridiculous. I stopped. I turned away from the door and walked into the snow, toward the line of trees across the moonlit field of white. Behind them was a ditch I played in as a child. I went to it and stepped carefully down the slope. The trough felt narrower every time I visited. Now, it was little more than an arm’s length across, but nonetheless I felt safe there, enclosed by the gentle curves of the earth. A gust of freezing wind blew through it. I shivered and laid down.
I lay there in the snow until my body went numb from the cold. Wearily, I shut my eyes and wondered if anyone in that golden place had even noticed that I left. It didn’t matter. I thought about how it would be dangerous to fall asleep here, but that didn’t matter either. My thoughts slurred into images and drifted into a cold anesthesia, until the flash of a memory made me jolt awake with a laugh.
I left the glass on the floor.
December 10, 2024
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