In my last post, I detailed a confusing encounter with a guy wherein I thought an uneven power dynamic was prevailing. However, as it turns out, he was just shy. And I realised that it was his initial uncaring demeanour that had attracted me in the first place. Regardless, he invited me to a party the other weekend and I decided to go and make the most of being young – despite the fact that I didn’t really know this guy at all.
It was on a beach and I got there sometime before midnight. There was a DJ, fire-throwers, glow-in-the-dark hula hoops that people were throwing up into the air and spinning.
It was a night of interesting feelings; feelings of lust and impulse – although, tragically, not directed at the guy who had invited me to the party. When I arrived there initially – at this beach in the almost dark surrounded by music and around 200 other people – I clocked this guy also looking for his friends. A blonde New Zealander called Braden who offered to accompany me on my search around the beach.
We made small talk and he eventually offered me to join him and hang out with his friends if I couldn’t find who I was looking for. He was attractive and I felt an implication as we looked at each other – maybe we could’ve had a fun night together. But I bid him farewell as I continued my search alone.
I found him after not too long and met some of his friends and danced and chatted with them. I’ve never smoked and drank so much and remained so level-headed, which was strange. I felt like I was chasing a buzz the whole time that never really came. Maybe it was just really bad weed. But the guy I was with was gracious enough to let me share whatever he was smoking, which was nice of him.
Later on we migrated to a spot under a canopy behind the beach populated by some excitable young guys in tracksuits (trying not to use the word “chav”) and some relaxed Spanish people clearly looking to become more unrelaxed by doing lines or Mandy. One guy actually asked me to hold his phone while he prepared a line on it. Ah, what fun.
I’ve never done anything you could consider an “upper”. Mainly because I’ve suffered from anxiety and palpitations in the past so the very idea of stimulating my nervous system even more slightly horrifies me. The guy I was with thinks he took some Mandy – although he wasn’t too sure. How you could lack the presence to know either way is confounding to me, but there you go.
A muscly guy with cornrows, a tight turtleneck jumper and a thin gold chain introduced himself to us and texted a “menu” to me consisting of four ingestible items at varying prices for me to forward onto my friend, whose phone was dead. He didn’t sell weed, he said, too complicated. The irony of myself, a dispenser by trade, sitting in this situation was not lost on me. But life is funny like that.
We decided, my friend and I, to venture home sometime after 2 or 3 but wound up at another beach party about a mile down the road. The light in the sky was different now, changing from dark to dawn. We heard the music first, pulsating from another DJ tent below the sand dunes, and saw the people next – dancing on the sand. This party was on a smaller scale and seemed more intimate so I was reluctant to intrude but my friend was less hesitant. So we clambered down the sandy hill.
I was welcomed by a guy whose name I can’t remember but he had a strange accent. He had grown up in the Scottish highlands but then moved to France as a child. Really, what an unfortunate accent. But he was lovely, his upward inflection communicating an intense friendliness. He offered us a vegan brownie to which my friend and I lit up! What he produced out of his bag was more akin to a mud pie, though. He lifted the lid off a large Tupperware container and it was filled with this brown, quivering mass which I’m sure tasted lovely but I wasn’t prepared to find out.
Throughout the night my friend tended to hover around groups of people and I tended to wander off for introspection so I moved towards the DJ tent and danced alone among strangers. I saw a face I recognised, however, but he didn’t register me. It was a Swedish guy I’d met at one of the more wacky open mics I’d been to recently which was actually just a glorified house party.
We had sat together that night after I’d smoked a copious amount of weed and exchanged flirtatious remarks. There had been one guy who was so paralytic he was unable to connect the microphone back to the mic stand and was repeatedly attempting to slide it in the wrong way. After a few seconds of retaining my composure, I burst into laughter. I was laughing so hard I was barely making any noise and this Swedish guy sat regarding me with a bemused expression.
He wasn’t really my type. He was a hippy-ish kind of guy with blonde dreadlocks and a long beard. But the way he looked at me and spoke to me made me excited. He teased me, saying in a matter-of-fact way that I was not a nice person for laughing. But I was high and this just made me laugh even more. He asked me about my work (in particular, my uniform…) and I watched beneath my lashes as cogs turned in his head. “It’s not that nice”, I deflected and he replied that it’s what inside that counts. As in, inside my uniform. How bold.
I told him I recognised him and confirmed his name – it was him. And I was like: “Remember we were talking…” but he seemed largely disinterested. He made small talk with me and I asked him what he’d been up to. Just work and “this”, he said gesturing to the party. I asked what he did and he replied: personal care for mentally challenged people. Oh, my heart. He seemed slightly bemused by my questions and any of that magnetic energy that had surrounded us at the open mic had clearly dissipated. What a shame. Because he looked even more beautiful to me this time round.
I wandered off to find my friend speaking to a group of people still – one of them another hippy-ish looking person with dreads, this time a girl. My friend had found a balloon on our travels here and was asking the girl to hold it for him. She was playfully challenging him – why couldn’t he just hold it? Her hair was brown and she was donning emerald glitter on her cheekbones. I felt an impulse building in me like fizzy juice shaken up in a can and said directly: “You’re really pretty”. She smiled and leaned over to me to kiss me on the cheek. “You’re really pretty, too”.
Coming to terms with bisexuality is a strange thing. I stood there looking at her, this strange excitability stirring within me; not knowing whether to validate my feelings or not. Where is the line between admiration and attraction? A friend and a lover? Do I want us to entangle our bodies together or is it just fondness and tenderness?
A little later, I was wandering up the hill myself again and a girl was passing me holding a brownie-clad spoon. I can’t remember what she was saying to me, maybe asking if I wanted some of the brownie. She was standing with her back to the sea and I was looking at her. The sky was beautiful – a swirling mix of pale blue, yellow, pink and orange – and her hair was died a faded pink. I remember that the way the pink mixed with the bleach in her hair reminded me of a Drumstick sweetie. I felt another compulsion while looking at her to ask if I could in fact taste some of the brownie but rather via her tongue instead of the spoon. But almost as soon as the thought rushed into my head, she was bounding off down the hill again like a sprite.
I almost felt the breath leave my body considering all the feelings that had possessed me that night as I was left alone facing the sunrise melting the sky into the sea, the bass still thumping from the DJ tent.
Thanks for reading!
– SMUT. ❤
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