You Won't Remember This On Monday

Story 2/8

We were all at the pub for someone's leaving drinks. The company had gotten big enough for me to have a few unfamiliar faces floating around. Funnily enough, I think it was leaving drinks for the guy that didn’t drink. I heard someone joking about the irony earlier. He was an odd man. He would sometimes heat up his eggs in the office microwave. I sometimes felt like a 21st-century girl holding on for dear life, just trying to make it to tomorrow, clinging onto a rock in a sea of emails and Pret sandwiches.

But what was tomorrow, really? The weekends started on Thursday… a lie we all told ourselves. It was a conspiracy. Because the hangover on a Friday wasn’t cute, or chic. It was a war crime. Walking into the office with a coffee the size of your head and the brightness of the computer screen needing to be as low as possible was a painful and grating experience.

I was outside, sitting at the front of the pub, next to a guy who was next to a girl. Sabi, I think. One of the newer ones. The tables were so close to the wall that if you leaned back even a little, you’d be pressed up against the brick wall. Like chewing gum. I could feel it behind me. The guy was clearly trying his luck with her. An easy target. One of those office flirty things that wasn’t real but also kind of was. I was clearly third-wheeling. Does it count as third-wheeling if the girl wasn’t into the guy? His body language shifted into ‘cool mode’, which mostly meant awkward angles. He pulled up one of his knees so it was poking against the edge of the table, just hovering. His foot was swinging and his arms were folded and it looked incredibly unnatural. It was an odd move. We were having a light chit-chat about weekend plans. I made a joke, something light, and Sabi laughed and asked me to repeat it, but before I could, I said,
“Well, I’m not surprised you didn’t hear me over the knee.”
That got him. I didn’t mean to do it in a cruel way. But he got a bit embarrassed, and of course pretended not to be. You know when everyone’s pretending not to feel weird, it makes things weirder.

I had to divert my ears to the conversation opposite me. Two girls who had never really looked at me twice. I didn’t think this was going to be the night to change that. They were being mean and nasty about a girl they knew from school, but they could justify this by, instead, calling it a ‘character analysis’.
“I mean, the thing is that someone else’s opinion of me isn’t really any of my business. Like, if she said any of this stuff about me, I just wouldn’t really care,” one girl said, then sipped her drink. “I hope the people I hate never change.”
“But doesn’t it bore you to be talking about these people? Like, don’t they infuriate you?” the other girl replied, trying to keep up.
“Not really, I mean, I love bitching and moaning about people, so, if the people I bitch and moan about change based on, God forbid, anything that I say, then who am I going to bitch and moan about? I hope the people I hate never take my opinion seriously, because then they’ll do something about all their imperfections. What am I going to talk about then?”

It was difficult to argue with her logic. I mean, if the people you talk about give you nothing to talk about, what are you going to talk about? It made some grotesque sense. Like a sitcom laugh track on mute. I guessed your material source does dry up if the people you talk about stop being awful. It was classic supply and demand.

The thing about the people you worked with was that you were all… what’s the word… hostages. That’s quite harsh actually. I take it back. But you were all oddly confined to time and space at the ripe old age of twenty-five. People from all over, all mashed together, expected to get along and like each other enough to want to do well for one another.

But even in the chaos, certain species emerged. There were a few guys I walked past who were always talking about going to the gym. All the time. I couldn’t believe it. But the strange thing was… none of them looked like they went to the gym enough to justify this. They had the exact same bodies as the IT department that had ham and cheese sandwiches and salt and vinegar crisps for lunch. But that didn’t stop them from running each other through their gym routine on the daily and discussing cutting and bulking like it was sacred text.

Then there were a few girls who talked about food like it was a crime. I caught snippets of their conversation when I went to grab my lunch from the fridge.
“You’re supposed to eat your protein first so your blood sugar doesn’t spike.”
“I’ve actually found fasting works better for me.”
“Did you know that having coffee on an empty stomach isn’t actually as bad as everyone says it is?”
As if Glucose Goddess hadn’t been spouting the same information all over town for the past couple of years.

There were weird dynamics too. Guys that would speak to you on Thursday after a few drinks, then ignore you on Monday like you’d been wiped from their memory. It was almost as if the alcohol had made me more attractive and easy to talk to, but hey, that was just me speculating.

I got up and left the table to get a drink from inside and was hovering by a conversation in the queue.
“Oh I love that song! You know, I always equate certain songs to the peace you find with yoga. Like, the whole purpose of yoga, the reason you do it — it’s not the movement or the stretching. You actually do all those poses so you crave the stillness of shavasana, which is when you lie down on the mat and find yourself at peace after focusing on your breath and movement with your breath for so long.”
“Ah wow I didn’t know that–”
“Yeah, so it’s like you go through all the movement to find peace in the stillness, and I really feel like with Aurora by Foo Fighters, you kind of have to sit in the first ¾ of the song, as beautiful as it is, to get to the instrumental bit at the end where all the instruments just come together in this explosion of sound. God, it’s great.”
“Yeah I bet,” he said, sipping his Amstel. He had come in to keep her company. It didn’t really matter what she said, he was just proud to be speaking to her after ogling at her for the past three weeks every time she walked into the office and didn’t look at him once.
“It’s like you kind of sit through something and then you find peace. I get that.”
“Exactly! You’ve earned the right to sit back and melt into the song further.”
“You get it, you totally get it!”
“It’s kind of like finding nirvana, I guess,” he said. She frowned.
“Nirvana happens when you die.”

There were three girls who stuck together, who were tall, all looked the same, and were always laughing. They had their own slick style and looked like they’d rolled off the same Pinterest board. Was it fair to knock people who were always happy and merry and jolly? I wasn’t sure, but I was much more interested in talking to the sourpuss in the corner who hadn’t cracked a smile once, only when someone offered her a cigarette. That was the kind of joy I trusted.

Later, someone was talking about the pet rat they had at university. A monster of a rat. He showed us photos. The thing was the size of a small cat that had been pumped with steroids. People would visit the rat when they were off their nut at parties and spend hours just watching it run around the guy’s bedroom. On more than one occasion, the rat got out and would steal snacks off the kitchen counter, and it could open jars. I didn’t believe the second bit. The rat had a name, Meatloaf, because it was round and heavy and oddly comforting. It was the second time that night I found myself struggling to argue with grotesque logic. One time after a party, the rat was nowhere to be found. The guys in the house were freaking out because you weren’t allowed to have pets in university accommodation. They found it a few days later, eating crumbs behind the fridge and terrified. The guy said that it was the only thing at university tougher than the rugby team, and honestly, I believed him. He went to Loughborough.

That story stuck with me for a while. Its sheer absurdity and detachment from reality made me remember how random life could be. The night continued to unravel. The gym talk was finally fizzling out, and the gossip was swirling sharper. The sourpuss was lighting her cigarette and didn’t crack a smile. Not like the three chuckle sisters from Pinterest who laughed like they had a script memorised.

For me, the night was beginning to come to an end. One more drink and I'd be spilling all my secrets. I found myself wanting to leave before I became conscious of the conversation I would begin to humour. We’re talking about the gym again? Go on then, tell me more. Gossip? No, you’re not being mean, just honest. A suitably below-surface-level conversation? Might as well keep this going seeing as you won’t even look at me on Monday.

I walked home and skipped many a song on my playlist until I found one that fit my vibe. Everything sounded fake. Like the kind of music you hear when you’ve gone to bed but the afters is still going on. The odd, fuzzy, hallucinating-y sound. Eventually, one stuck. Shoot You Down by The Stone Roses. A beautifully calm song that marked the end of the night and summoned self-reflection. It didn’t ask any questions, it just let you sink into it. I felt small and invisible, but alive in the way you are when the world forgets you’re watching.

And maybe that was enough. The more I found myself on the outside, slowly backing away from the depths of performance, the more I was able to understand. I wasn’t really looking for noise anymore. I think I was looking for silence.