It was about midnight, but the streets were full of people. Holding my hand tightly, Paula made her way through the crowd of guys in pajamas and girls in tutus. From time to time, she fish out a bottle of cheap wine from her coat pocket, take a sip, and passed it to me. I paused and took a sip, trying to swallow the sour liquid as quickly as possible without tasting it. We slowly made our way through the city at night. The streets, usually busy, seemed to be immobilized by general merriment. Occasional cars sneaked cautiously between pedestrians carelessly strolling along the roadway. The residents, usually so proper that they are ready to explain to you how to drink water, were having fun in a cathartic fit. A carnival reigned all around.
In the thick of the crowd, I watched this all-encompassing fun as if from afar, remembering either Bakhtin’s carnival or the film “The Purge.” The wine left a nasty aftertaste in my mouth, and the pain grew between my shoulder blades. I was brought to the carnival by the same desire that one evening, between scrolling through my Instagram feed and ignoring emails from work, made me open Tinder and write to the first person I came across, which turned out to be Paula. This desire drove me out of the house, where the walls were shrinking, folding around me like an ugly origami, ready to crush me. I desperately wanted something to happen. Something beautiful, incredible, disgusting. Something that would make my bored heart skip a bit, freeze for a moment, ache a little. A quiet, tingling sensation that could prove to me that life was still worth living.
In recent months, I have felt like an empty shell, scrabbed of all desires, thoughts, and intentions. I woke up in a cold room, boiled some tea, and looked at the black mold growing in patches on the poorly painted wallpaper. I didn’t wait for or hope for anything. The world has shrunk to the size of a room with a cracked Ikea table and cardboard boxes, left over from a move, pilled up in the corner. In this room, no one demanded that I be anyone, and I slowly disappeared. If my disappearance had been described by Camus or Perec (or another literary genius), then perhaps something tragic could have been glimpsed through it—something worthy, if not of a two-hundred-page dissertation, then at least of a student essay littered with typos. But I remained just me—someone lying in a dusty room on the outskirts of Wuppertal.
Disappearance was neither a goal nor a passion for me. Part of me, on the contrary, desperately did not want to disappear and constantly looked around in search of something that could save me, start the rusty mechanism of the heart again. I spent hours scrolling through Instagram, updating my Twitter feed, and watching suggested videos on YouTube. But everything from the photographs of the seashore, the thin girls constantly biting into fancy food and nodding approvingly, to the colorful infographics with incredibly important social content, only made me yawn. Except that one day I came across a recording of a concert of some French band. There was nothing special about their music. It sounded well enough, perfectly resembling the songs of more famous performers, but didn’t strike as anything revolutionary. A copy of something amazing, the song was sung and then forgotten. I was about to close the video when I noticed something strange in the guitarist’s habits that caught my attention. Focused while playing, he didn’t particularly stand out, but in the silence filled with reserved applause and creaking of the stage, something strange appeared in his habits. For a split second, his movements were out of rhythm. For a split second, his short figure looked awkward and completely lost, surrounded by the dimness of the stage. My heart suddenly sank. Surprised by this reaction, I decided to make an experiment and find other videos of the guitarist, which turned out to be not such an easy task. Faced with the task of finding a video mentioning the most common French name, YouTube was showing me only a series of news releases and financial reports. Finally, between a discussion about the future of education and a reportage about a strike of social workers, a video from some kind of concert appeared. It was not immediately clear whether this was the same group: the lead singer sat in the back of the stage and played the piano; a bit on the left, the bass player played drums. The guitarist stood next to another musician, clutching the microphone. He looked especially lost without his guitar.
He shifted awkwardly from foot to foot, rubbed his fingers, waved his arms. His gestures were too much for a man who feels comfortable in his body. He sang in a quiet voice, which seemed about to be reduced to a whisper, but this unexpectedly did not happen. I was fascinated by how skillfully he balanced on the border, where his voice was about to crack. After singing the song, he bowed awkwardly, nodded to the musician next to him, and smiled quietly, and I thought that even though there was no love in my heart, it would be nice to take him in my arms and cuddle him like a big cat.
Over the next two months, I watched all the YouTube videos with this band, studying their unremarkable repertoire. The sight of the small guitarist distracted me for a short time from my melancholy, and it seemed like it was everything I could hope for. Until one evening, I wrote to Paula. Until Paula invited me to the carnival, and I agreed.
As we turned into a small street, colored by the lights of pubs, I thought about how fair it was to promise her something that I couldn’t give. Paula wanted a relationship, and I wanted not to be alone, which, if you think about it, was not the same thing at all.
As we made our way through the crowd of people, we approached a small club. On the street, young girls in oversize hoodies gathered in front of a short security guard. With her unruly curls and giant eyes, she looked like Natasha Lyonne, which was clearly appreciated among the club’s visitors. Paula quickly finished the wine and, hiding the bottle next to the door of the nearest house, pulled me towards the queue to the club. As we got closer, I noticed that most of the visitors looked like teenagers, while I, in a spacious coat and a bright red dress with a bell skirt, looked like their approving mother. The pain in my back intensified. Paula did not seem to be embarrassed by the youth of her visitors. She straightened her coat, gave Natasha Lyonne her hand for a stamp, and slipped into the club. I hesitantly extended my wrist after her. The girl put a simple stamp with the name of the club on it and let me through.
Music of all possible genres was deafening. It was absolutely impossible to understand on which basis someone compiled this playlist: the song of the World Cup followed Taylor Swift’s ballad, after pop music of the early 2000s played Let it go. The crowd, as it seemed, didn’t share my frustration about this questionable music choice and bounced, obeying the rhythm only they could understand. Paula pulled me onto the dance floor, moving to the rhythm of the dancers. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make sense of the reigning cacophony. My body seemed like a foreign object among this dense mass moving in unison. I let go of Paula’s hand and squeezed through the crowd to the corner, where visitors left their bags and coats on the sticky floor. She didn’t try to hold me back.
“Why am I here?” I thought, watching Paula kiss first one and then another girl, without breaking the rhythm of the dance. No matter how hard I tried, I could not decipher the secret of their fun. “Alcohol,” it suddenly dawned on me, and, squeezing my way up the narrow stairs, I went up to the bar. Next to a wall lined with broken TVs, a frail girl in an oversize shirt swiftly moved between giant bottles. I found a seat in the corner with a view to the street and ordered an aperol. Outside the window, groups of girls who just carelessly ran outside, forgetting their coats, huddled together. Sometimes one of them would pull the other one towards her, and they would freeze, clinging close to each other. I took a sip of the disgustingly sweet cocktail. I felt sick.
On the other side of the bar, a brunette dressed in beige from head to toe was looking at me intensely. “Lesbian death stare,” I remembered. I nodded to her, and she left her friends and approached me. “Are you alone?” I shrugged in response. She looked at my glass, where the ice was melting into the orange liquid. “I’ll meet you on the dance floor in ten minutes,” she said confidently and returned to her friends. I forced myself to take another sip of the lukewarm aperol. Nausea rose in my throat again.
“How do people feel comfortable in their own skin?” I thought to myself. I remembered Akwaeke Emezi’s book, where they talked about themselves as a monster, who experienced every sensation with incredible intensity, beyond any human comprehension. I also always felt myself hardly human, but instead of experiencing the body as the source of infinite transcendental joy, it seemed to me that only thin invisible threads binding me to my flesh. My thoughts always ran too fast, far far away. They floated carelessly until the threads tightened, reminding me of my heavy, clumsy body. A body that shamelessly put on display everything I wish I could forget. Wrinkles, pimples, asymmetries, and flaws were undeniable evidence that my life didn’t belong to me. In my thoughts, I, tall and thin, swung my foot in an elegant shoe. In my thoughts, I went down to the dance floor and spun carelessly, bewitching everyone around me. In my thoughts, a brunette in beige came up to me and pulled me towards her. In my thoughts, kisses are beautiful, like on movie posters or gift cards.
But at the same moment, my body was pulling me toward the ground. It sat slouched in front of the lukewarm liquid in a glass. The pain in the back became insufferable, as if someone were stabbing me between the shoulder blades again and again. I just wanted to come home and take a hot shower. I remembered that I left my keys in Paula’s apartment, whom, as I thought about it, I hadn’t seen for at least an hour. This thought made me feel even more exhausted.
I left the aperol on the bar, passed Natasha Lyonne, and went out into the cool night. The narrow street, which during the day attracted tourists with its old-fashioned charm, was covered in bottles and broken glass. Here and there, on the steps of the business center opposite the club, at the entrances of houses, and right on the asphalt, people were drinking, chatting, and smoking, with only T-shirts saving them from the unforgiving November cool. If I had cigarettes, I could have blended in with the crowd for a while without looking weird and lost. There would be an understandable logical reason for me to stand still outside the bar. I glanced around the area: Paula was nowhere to be found. Fatigue slowly crept into my muscles and settled into my bones.
I thought that I could not survive in this world on my own, but the road for others seemed like an impossible chore. Perhaps I missed the moment when everyone else got their maps with the shortest path to each other, and now all I could do was endlessly wander around, never reaching my destination. I thought that when I were imagining love, I always saw it as something that had already happened. Love for me was like a tumor discovered too late, tightly binding our bodies with growing miasmas. Love, where we had already made peace and divided the lands. An incredible intimacy where our bodies moved in unison.
But my body stood there alone. Too far, even from myself. I had nothing to say and nowhere to go. I kicked the empty bottle, buttoned up my coat, and walked towards the subway.