Your driver is 10 minutes away
Be ready outside.
the bar is worse than i remembered. the floor is sticky, the drinks are weak, the music is punitively loud, even for a 23-year-old. my left ear is ringing after a guy i haven’t seen since graduation — and spoke to maybe thrice before — scream-slurred his life updates into it. my hearing won’t be right for days, which will be one of many reasons i ultimately stop coming back here. the novelty of running into almost-friends and pseudo-strangers one weekend a year, having the same conversation thirty times in a row, is short-lived.
the one upside: drinks are a quarter of what i’d pay back east. here, for the first time in my life, i feel rich. i can buy rounds here — which is useful, because the friends i came with left, and i’m having to make new ones. there are still a few seniors i know, and i insist on buying their drinks, honoring tradition as recent grads once did for me.
i remember how acute the class division felt on the weekends: if you had access to a parent’s credit card, your night could start whenever you felt like it. if you had to pay for shit yourself, you’d refresh your bank app on 11:59 every other thursday, waiting for the clock to strike midnight until the $80 or so you cobbled together from part-time minimum-wage jobs would hit your account. then you’d run to the ATM that wouldn’t charge you a fee, wait in line, feel a sense of camaraderie with all the other broke bitches, then run to get a cab to this very bar, sneak sips from a flask as you wait in line again, annihilate your consciousness with alcohol. we would do this for (at least) three consecutive nights, rinse, repeat. i am grateful that i don’t miss it, but at 23 i still drink too much — it’ll take me several more years to realize how easily and eagerly this place bred alcoholics. (god forbid anyone smokes a blunt, though!)
the night always ends at 3AM with the same few songs played in succession. i flirt with the idea of staying until then, realize i don’t want to, and decide to leave. powerful! brave! and easy, since most of my friends are gone.
buzzed but not quite drunk, i breeze out of the bar into the warm september night. summer always seemed to last so long here. there are no cabs around, so i open the lyft app, thinking on how it didn’t exist when i first got here. a few weeks into my first semester, i had to walk miles back to campus alone at 3AM. cops pulled over to yell at me, thinking i was a sex worker. i felt unsafe enough on the streets to indulge in the white girl luxury of pleading for a ride home. they spat “this isn’t a taxi service” and sped off.
lyft is almost a taxi service, but the nearest car is 14 minutes away. i roll my eyes with east-coast impatience. a year ago, i probably would’ve ordered the ride then gone back inside for another round. but i am 23, eons older and wiser than the seniors inside, singing and swaying to piano man, everything ahead of them.
the door to the bar jangles open. out of the corner of my eye i see a guy lean against the wall to my right, fiddling with his phone, undoubtedly doing the same thing i am, for in the end we are all predictable algorithms. i don’t fully look at him until he says my name.
oh. wow. god, he looks good. this is honestly the last thing i fucking need right now.
i can’t remember the last time i saw him, but i remember the first. the sensation of missing a stair, of forgetting my own name. the sudden calm that time he put his arm around me after that party where we talked all night and walked home together in the middle of the street. the utter certainty that this was a person i was destined to be in love with. that time we stood on a balcony overlooking the ocean and i realized if he wouldn’t kiss me now, he never would. and the night at this very bar, when one of my best friends kissed him — following me around to make sure i’d see! — and the ensuing devastation of an almost cartoonish betrayal. he hadn’t known what i felt, but she had, and that was worse. i’ve been the crying liability drunk girl exactly thrice. the other two times were because somebody died.
some sort of greeting is choked out of me. i ask what he’s been up to, because i genuinely don’t know — i quietly unfollowed him on everything a while back, for my own sanity. as he talks, i relax into the relief of realizing i genuinely don’t feel anything for him anymore. it was a brief, intense, youthful fancy. i hadn’t been in love with him. i had been in love at him, which was slightly easier to recover from.
he tells me about his life. i smile and nod politely, like i hadn’t called a doctor shortly after we met because i thought something was wrong with my heart. like he wasn’t the reason my palms sweat for the first time. i hadn’t known they could do that.
“so,” he says, stepping a little closer. “it seems like you’ve really been killing it in new york.”
i freeze a little. he looks good even under these stupid neon green lights. i probably look like shrek. but by the way he’s looking at me, i might not. he is not yet close enough to kiss, but he could be. if i still wanted him.
the lyft is still 10 minutes away. a thousand possible lifetimes could unfold by then. we’re back on the balcony. we’re in the middle of the street. we’re meeting in the dining hall for the first time. i’m telling my friends about him. i’m wondering how he feels about me and haven’t yet been proven wrong.
a cab pulls up — a regular one, not a lyft — and i choose.
“yeah, i kind of am,” i shrug with an insouciance i do not feel. “well, this is me — so good to see you! glad you’re doing well,” etc, etc. banal pleasantries spill from my lips as i grab the cab. i fumble with the sliding door, utterly fucking up the smooth exit i’d intended.
once the door is shut, i beg: “can you please take me back to campus?”
the driver turns to me, glances to the beautiful man outside, sizes up the situation. “twenty dollars.”
“twenty?!” i shriek — it is usually three. but he has shrewdly and accurately assessed my desperation to get out of there, so i accept defeat. i cancel the lyft and eat the $5 penalty, telling myself $25 is a small price to pay to avoid the self-destruction i inevitably would have wrought had i stayed.
i never see him again. i don’t regret my choice, and don’t think about it much — despite writing about it now. but i can’t forget it, because it became the blueprint for how i fall in love: quickly, consumingly, with a spark whose absence i’ll never settle for. there will be other almost-loves, old flames i’ll allow to briefly reignite. there will be many more times i feel so beautiful and so certain and am wrong anyway. mostly, there will be people i let close enough to kiss, but not close enough to love. there will be plenty more people i am in love at, and vice versa. i wait, with varying degrees of patience, to be in love with. i am still waiting.