Two Parties
Created: 2022-12-16 (12:00:00) — Modified: 2025-06-18 (18:51:16)Status: completed
House party
I remembered parties held in this cramped third floor apartment. The complex had been around for decades but for most that time it had been an office block. Its conversion into residences constituted something of an afterlife for the place.
So it was weirdly configured. I entered my apartment onto a mezzanine overlooking the downstairs living room and the kitchen. The bedroom and bathroom, accessible through both the door opposite the entrance and from a staircase in the back of the kitchen, also looked downstairs. A balcony opened off the bedroom. Weirdly configured. Awkward to get around. In anxious moods, I’d circle around the interconnecting rooms up and down the stairs. But it was all mine and though the practice had fallen off it had been host to many parties.
I mostly hung around with unemployed slackers and university students. I was both an unemployed slacker and a student. The parties themselves were shabby affairs, cheese boards and goon, but they invariably lasted until the early hours of the morning. It was impressive just how many people we could fit into the downstairs pit, which formed a very serviceable dancefloor when we turned off all the lights. How did we hold onto the tenancy?
Miraculously we never attracted a noise complaint. Possibly the place was better insulated than it first seemed. Or, possibly there was no-one else in any of the surrounding apartments. It was and still is rare to encounter other people in the hallways and stairs. Maybe it had been abandoned at some point and no-one had thought to tell me.
Anyway. Those times are long past. The downstairs is occupied by a large sunny couch on which presently a furry fat cat sleeps. It is quiet inside as out.
Block party
I went to a huge party held in the middle of the night in a crumbling block of flats. Whoever invited me failed to show. The whole complex had been thrown open but oh wow it was really falling down. Terraced units leaning on one another. Stairwells and corridors connecting different disorderly levels but their layout suggested more a labyrinth than a place people had ever actually lived.
The doors were pulled off their hinges and the rooms stripped bare so that the boundary between inside and outside got even more middled. Someone had hung fairy lights and paper lanterns, but sparsely and unevenly, illuminating some rooms and leaving dark vacancies in others. People seemed to either gravitate towards or away from the light. Maybe it was for deliberate effect.
I saw a lot of familiar faces in the crowd, including an unwelcome one. I disentangled myself before they could see me and sat for a while in the park opposite, under the shadows of the pine trees. Then delved back into the chaos. It was so much more freeing to be on my own here, unattached, drifting.
Endmatter
Tags: @apartments @completed @dream-diary
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