Part 1: No exit
I met her at her work. She was wearing a white summer dress with little green and red flowers on it. This lent her an air of lightness and frivolity. I told her that she looked good, that she looked very feminine and girly. She thought this was a bad thing and so changed into another outfit. I didn’t like the new outfit, so I asked her to change back. She complied.
We left her work and headed to the sushi restaurant where we would meet the others. When we arrived, the three of them were already sitting at the table. One of them was a mutual friend of ours, a tall, fastidious boy who usually presented with a clean and precise appearance and had gone twenty-three years without ever having kissed another human being. I didn’t know the other two. One of them had long, unruly hair and an absent manner which made him seem like he was on drugs (despite positively stressing later on that he was not). The other looked like a boy I had gone to school with. This boy had possessed the unfortunate character trait of being very meek; he was often bullied and eventually ended up dead the day after his twenty-second birthday after slipping over in the bathroom. I noticed his dinner doppelganger was very much alive and didn’t seem particularly meek, so it seemed the similarity ended there.
The three others seemed reserved, but I wasn’t. A crude joke erupted periodically from my mouth between gulps of sparkling white wine and hasty bites of a soft-shell crab. I noticed she wasn’t eating much. She said that she hadn’t been eating much lately, and sure enough, you could tell because she looked thinner. She didn’t look thin though, just thinner. She was perfect.
After dinner, we all left the restaurant and headed to a nearby roof-top bar. When we arrived, I glanced anxiously around the roof-top, on the hunt for some ‘interesting people’ whom, after striking up a conversation, would relay to me that they were going to a party and would ask if we wanted to come with them (‘Yes!’, I would spit at them before they had even finished their sentence). I was desperate to get away from the others (though not her, of course) who were proving to be criminally dull. Of course, it was possible that they were just excessively reserved. But in any case, it amounted to the same thing in a situation like this. I knew I was desperate to throw myself wholeheartedly into the presence of some ‘very fascinating people’, who would almost certainly awaken within me a new vitality; or at the very least, some sort of brief spirit of hedonism which would momentarily drown out a lurking despair.