“No sign of the boys then?” Steve asked as we sat waiting for this morning’s keynote to start. I chuckled to myself.
“As long as they’re ready to drive us home,” said Lisa in reply. I made a comment about it being a very long time since I was out until 3am. By ‘a very long time’ of course, I meant ‘ever’, though I didn’t say that.
The keynote was all about ‘unlearning’. The speaker got us to do a great exercise where one person writes numbers in the air with their index finger, and the other, opposite, mirrors the movement. It’s surprisingly difficult to ‘unlearn’ the method for drawing a number 4. And call me old-fashioned, but I start an 8 in the middle.
By lunchtime, we reconnected with our partiers. ‘A couple of pints and then we’ll head back’ had turned into rather more, and rather longer, after the beach party, it seems. While they found piecing together their memories of it all, hilarious, I was still quite thankful I’d chosen the boring route.
Boring eh. I looked at my grey cardigan and sensible shirt. I had balanced a box of halloumi salad on a notebook on my knee, and a tightly-sealed water bottle stood upright in the grass. I was in symmetry. Yet, still kind of alone. Is this how boring people end up? Eating halloumi out of a cardboard box while the asymmetric people laugh about how great a time they’re having?
Has this always been how you meet new people? Has this always been the route to social bonding? I found myself hoping not. It seems like an awful set of experiences to go through. Isn’t always better to prioritise the thing we’re actually here for? Is there a thing here for me to ‘unlearn’?
Anyway. We made it home. I’ve returned to a mess and I’m feeling tired, which is probably the worst possible combination of things.
Also, in a sort of mystery I can’t solve, the big toe on my right foot went black. I discovered it when I took my socks off.
It’s as though I’ve dipped it in ink - it mostly comes off with warm water, but I have no idea what happened there. Weird alien experiment? Sharpie in a sock? Is it blood? Can blood turn black overnight? Why doesn’t it hurt? Elaborate but very odd practical joke? Hmm.
Or perhaps I did go out last night and every single aspect of the evening was wiped from my memory, except one somehow-injured toe? Perhaps I’m less boring than I thought?
It says something to me that we all know it’s much more likely to be aliens.
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