Howdy.

How’s the week been?

I went out to a fancy hotel bar with a friend the other night and found myself thinking about the innocent worlds we feel ourselves leaving behind as we step inside of intoxicatingly new ones.

This is about that night. Or, a personal, diary-like post about a glamorous night spent out in the city, feeling very 21.

GATSBY’S PARTY

I don’t know what it would have been like to attend one of Gatsby’s fictitious parties, but I imagine it might have looked something like this.

Our ride pulled us up through the circle drive as the bell hop swept open the tall doors in dramatic fashion, revealing a world of another era. A world of jazz clubs and flapper dresses and class. People spun around us like tops, martini glasses in hand, absorbed in their own dizzying night. Bartenders shook drinks at rapid speed as gorgeous women sat perched at the barstools, surveying the crowd. The ceiling twinkled, reflecting the golden, rosy lights like a galaxy of stars. I stared up it and felt the room move around me as shoulders brushed against mine, heavy wafts of perfume assaulting my senses. Just beyond the bar, the Hollywood-esque swimming pool stretched before us in a glowing cyan blue, conjuring up images of Marilyn Monroe lounging poolside, cigarette in hand.

Still relatively new to the legal side of drinking, the Friday night elegant bar scene still feels like the forbidden world I knew it as in my youth, from behind the legs of my parents. It’s another one of those strange moments of growing up where you find yourself inhabiting a space that you can’t quite wrap your brain around your admittance into. You feel both very young and very old at the same time. My friend and I floated around in a daze, awestruck at the ornate beauty that a recent $31 million renovation produced for our very eyes to see that night. A couple of middle-aged guys, each sloppily clutching two empty beer bottles in their hands, tried very poorly to flirt with us in a drunken stupor before we ducked away to the bathroom, laughing.

OBSERVING HUMANITY

Which, if you don’t know, is a world of it’s own.

Meaning, women’s bar restrooms remain one of the most entertaining spaces that I have ever fallen into. It’s sort of like what you imagine boy’s locker rooms to be like before a big game. Everywhere you look are tipsy girls reapplying their lipstick and borrowing hair ties from total strangers, telling them how gorgeous they look in that dress. It’s a compliment factory, where women hype each other up and ask where they got that top or those shoes, usually coupled with an overshare of some kind. One girl told me how much she loved my necklace, and then launched into how she is going to Greece next week. Another was pressing her hands against the wall as her friend zipped up the back of her dress with the same force I imagine a Victorian corset requiring. Effortless entertainment and writing material right there.

Reentering the crowd, we ran around that place with our tiny drinks in hand, feeling a bit like Joyce Johnson running around New York City at night in her youth during the 1960s. Being most likely the youngest person there, I felt like a baby in the womb of the world. Which is refreshing, because most Friday nights I more often feel like a professor as I stay up all night, drinking tea and reading books until I pass out in a literary-induced delirium. Which, to be fair, is still the best thing ever.

The funny thing though, was that even in that bar, even in that other era, I was still thinking. Nostalgia was still sitting right next to me. I felt my mind wander to the the guy I was dating at this time last year who loved going out and couldn’t wait until I could legally go with him. We broke up before I turned twenty-one, but I often think about him when I’m at a bar. I would be lying if I said I didn’t look out across the sea of faces and search for his, wondering if it would still be gazing at mine like a flower to the sun. I suppose I selfishly harbor hopes of running into him in one of those spinning, hazy rooms, just to grab that drink that we never got to.

It’s never not strange, is it? The way we move on from people and places, becoming new versions of ourselves that they will never know.

A WORLD GONE AWAY

Which brings me to the next thing. After exploring the massive bar, the diner, the pool, the mirrored walls and red carpets and espresso martinis, I came home perfectly tipsy to do what I’m sure every twenty-something does in such a state. I sat down at my desk to write. I wrote in the uninhibited way that a buzz of alcohol produces, shaving off the hard edges of my perfectionist personality and allowing ink to flow freely onto the pages like blood spilling out of my own heart. It’s not a coincidence that Jack Kerouac, the mind behind the idea of unpunctuated, free-flowing “spontaneous prose”, was a raging alcoholic.

I found myself violently scribbling into my journal, realizing, even in my haze, that going out, more than anything, reminds me of innocence. Of being that kid behind my mom’s legs, looking out at the world at night like it was another plane of existence that I could never bring myself to completely believe. For when you’re a kid, the world feels like it’s behind glass. You can look, but you can’t touch. You can see the exciting and beautiful things dancing before you like drunken circus animals, but you can’t experience them. You can’t know for sure that they are real, only that they might be.

LOST PLACES

Then you grow up and the glass shatters at your feet. No more barrier, no more illusion of safety. You’re free. You’re wearing a dress and sipping gin in a bar, thinking about that previous world that you can’t ever return to. Like Alice, you have fallen down the rabbit-hole of the real world and you can never fall back out.

Not that I would necessarily want to, for that world did not exist in the way that I dream of it, here, from the other side. The world of innocence. The world of sunny afternoons and laundry and grilled cheese sandwiches cut on the diagonal. Nostalgia has long since covered these memories in soft, pink rose petals, promising things that never were. They only grow more distant, more hazy, and more inaccessible. For each new world that I step inside of, I leave another behind.

Coincidentally, I just came across a new favorite word in Sally Mann’s memoir Hold Still, called hiraeth. It’s Welsh, referring to “distant pain”, or what Mann calls a yearning for the lost places of our past…a word about the pain of loving a place. Those days, and the fleeting innocence that they represent, are a lost place. It only grow more distant. A sweet, melancholic, celebrated distance.

That, if anyone was wondering, is what floats through my mind in the middle of a crowded bar. What were you expecting?

Love, m.

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