why do you feel so hollow after a good night out with friends?

on post-social emptiness.

You’ve said goodbye; and suddenly your eyes are flooding as if to waterboard the truth out of you. Suddenly you’re alone again and the temperature’s anesthetic. It doesn’t matter how hot or cold. Just that no matter how further inward you draw yourself—how you cradle your own weight as if weakened arms could be strengthened by the familiarity of the burden—it will still be too late and your Uber is always five minutes away and the city scarcely recognizes itself having fallen so far from the light.

LED storefront signs blink along the block. People stumble out in front of you stinking of the alcohol they told the skeptical bodega owner they wouldn’t immediately drink. They move in swarms like fast-approaching headlights; astigmatism turns them into rays into static—or maybe it was just that you were trying to stave off impending sobriety by clinging on to the dizzy. ‘Almost’ is a respite without relief. Whatever could stretch the night into the week. The night could hold you without it ever demanding you ask what’s left of its stamina—the people knew that.

They could still distill their problems into something ornamental enough to be signified by a single chic object that is culture amongst them. The shitty boyfriend is nameless but functional. The girl always looks so hot when she’s wasted. They could still consume one another exclusively in bits of bathroom gossip that resolves itself when the last member leaves the mirror for the same reason no one with blinds raised to reveal a Christmas party or family dinner ever seems to be arguing when you pass their windows. Because somehow they’ve evaded the rise of the sun. Somehow you envy what you’d literally just done.

Your apartment sits between a shut-up corner store with a graffitied security gate and a ramshackle dance studio that hasn’t held a single class since you moved in. The inside looks a bit nicer than the out because there’s always at least two overhead lights blown out in the hall leading to your door. You don’t even set down your clutch when you enter your unit, just wander barefoot into the kitchen. Pull open the fridge to charcuterie scraps from that last time you visited friends. Sit tonight’s next to it like a trophy added to a shelf. It’s been three hours since last you ate, but you stay hungry for longer than need be. Not to be able to explain lethargy that began inexplicably long ago, but because you being fragile in this way feels like permission to be in another.

Admit it: everything done alone feels like an attempt to distract yourself from the absence of company. You worry you secretly find your own company inadequate—that sometimes thinking others’ arms warmer negates the idea that you’re secure within yourself.

On your way to the shower, you take some deep breaths in attempt to settle yourself. (In.) Out: You feel like a voyeur every time intimacy excludes you. (In.) Out: Every time you started a thought off with Remember that time we did X together? and they couldn’t recall as much as you did; but they’d said something about how the details didn’t matter, never mattered, because they didn’t have to know them to carry their impact into interactions with you—and do you have to remember every breath you take to understand its importance? Do you remember the one you took just now? Alright then. So you told yourself you don’t mind. But you couldn’t help that what it meant to find beauty in what surrounded the forgotten still prioritized the sanctity of remembering.

Step into the shower tray. Turn the hot water knob. The water stings. Sensation’s returned to your hands, and you’re trying to learn what it feels like to be moved by your own touch. Not to learn resolution for this all—you’ll feel this hangover after every night out, you think—but maybe to collapse the distance you feel from yourself into something more digestible.

Face. Neck. Chest. Stomach. Legs. The whole TSA sweep. Again and again the way a child on a road trip asks Are we there yet? with a whine in their voice—and yet again Are we there yet? when the reply isn’t immediate, and the parents exclaim “Almost!”.