A knock on the door is answered by all four of us, with mild amounts of banging and crashing; we all want to laugh with them as immediately as our intoxicated bodies will allow. It is thrown open with excessive force, perhaps due to our dexterity being at a level slightly lower than optimum, perhaps due to our eagerness, anticipation, agitation. And there they are, stood on the crumbling doorstep, clutching cans and premixed concoctions in repurposed ice-tea bottles, because we’ ll all be too hungover in the morning for anyone to pick up any leftovers. And my body feels charged, yet my lungs exude a breath of what seems like relief, because George is here.
We sit and drink and talk some more. A Spotify playlist, nowhere near as cool as the one we hear through the walls of the boys next door( but well-loved nonetheless), blends with the opening of bottles and ridiculous one-liners, and chimes off the walls and stained sofas, absorbing into the chipped floorboards, strengthening the foundation of messily naïve love these student terraces balance upon. Offers of hugs become replaced by,‘ Have you got your keys?’‘ Phone! Purse! Keys! Lip balm!’‘ Anna, have you got your keys?!’ There is almost as much love in these slurred shouts as there was in the tentative knocks. Noise is kinder here.
We skip, and laugh, and stumble and burn with life. Fast and bright. We’ re so alive, the heat exuberating from our fragile bodies, melting and softening the harshness of the cold Northern-English air. Invincible, as George lights me a cigarette. I let the pleasurable burning fill my chest and form trails of smoke that follow us in the dark, like we are beacons of light or superheroes or something romantic.
Taps of cards and stamps pressed onto hands numbing with cold, then strobe lights blind us and music bursts our eardrums, and we’ re in another world. Friends grab hands, now sweating from the mugginess and density of breath in the room, and twirl me round and round and round, as I move further and further away from anything real and central and possible. Arguments about what shot to get always end in tequila, and it stickily drips down our hands as we waste half of it in an attempt to clink plastic cups.
Toilet trips punctuate the night. Four in a cubicle at a time, because none of us can resist the constant narration of one another’ s lives. The turmoil, confusion, anarchy, of the inner lives of twenty-somethings reverberates around the stalls, with
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