Office Party

It all started in the ladies room, as it usually does before these office parties.  I had skillfully avoided last year's, blaming my back throwing itself out rather than spend time socializing with these people whose souls with I had chosen to spend my days watch die every single season, every teatime and bathroom break.  Truthfully, there was only one of them, who - it turned out- wasn't one of them at all, in front of whom I could breath, but the interludes of my week or day wherein he would show up had perhaps made the other 80% of the day that much more intolerable.  The golden strength of the sun that shined mainly in his windows just made the rest of the place seem so much more dank, like the bottom of an antiquated ship sinking, down about where the slaves rowed, not knowing that their shackles were locked by plastic toddler keys, and they could go for a swim any old time they liked.  But now it was down to business. Real business.  I heard the swollen, salient laughter of their Santa Claus gift giving game, and each sound was locked up within itself, padding the cell so thick - the so called family life that had them crated in tight, from which they hid frugally behind.  I put on my best face, black eyeliner and shimmering olive green and brown, as if I was going to a burlesque show in the trees, lit up drovers mingling chariots across the skies, if the skies in midtown west Manhattan could even manage to see their way to the ground, to us in our lonely shoes and past those tall, impotent and terrible buildings that blocked out the light.

My dress was tight, and yielding in all the right places. Maroon and black, I tightened up the belted band just below my chest.  It's time I showed them the goods, the way I do every day and night in which I exist outside of here.  The vines climbed with lotus and labyrinth and words down my back and arms with the knowledge of what lay behind me, of every day and second of the ticking hands that I had wasted.  The ones I could never ever get back.  So, then, in she came.  The walking little agenda with the fine dirty blond hair and eyes of a grasshopper leeching air out from the stagnant bathroom mist.  She peddled her own airs, through these all encompassing eyes, and clung so tight to this life that she felt was real, and entitled and so full up with code that she couldn't find her way out if she tried.  And, like most of them, she didn't like me, because I reminded her that her words were written, produced, presented and sponsored by her local advertising ego, and not much more. Boy, I thought, she must sleep soundly at night with all that posturing she had to keep up during the long day.  Like a babe in arms, without a thumb to suck.

She politely told me how she was going to use a curling iron for said party, and confessed that to me with indignation, as I offered her my hairspray.  I escaped, telling her to just return it to my desk, so I didn't have to be in her presence anymore, her voice trailing as I opened the hard bathroom door about how I won't tell anyone about her "natural curls", will I.......I agreed with whatever she said, and let the door slam behind me, trying as I usually did to forget that she ever existed.  Luckily, there was a big bottle of Irish Whiskey tucked neatly in the pink silken printed inside pockets of my open bag.  Every part of this made me smile my big painted up red mouth, and the knowledge that it was too broad and full to waste on this place led to the current knowledge that it sits safely in the middle of my bar/wine rack, where my black cat with mad eyes rolls around in my liquor every morning just to get my attention.

It was righteously dim in the party, and things went more smoothly and less excitedly then I had worried about/hoped for.  Avoidance of those who might steal my soul and wear it as a mismatched pelt did, of course, take place.  Solid soaking of my mouth with good dark wine helped line my insides and protect me against their notions, when they had any.  An Argentinian band played, warping round a rising and retreating swell of mist and ocean, taken in under the floorboards from the steady December rain outside.  Humid, and blue reflecting onto night, they played each man and woman I watched walk past, and cross the small street just outside the restaurant's windows.  Inside, corrugated, iron women spoke, flashy men yucked it up about stories that made me think only of ghosts, stuck in the building where they came to an untimely end, spouting out the beliefs that crossed their minds, crawling beneath their skin and lips when the final, unseen blow took them from life.  Here they were - stuck happily in this darkened, candlelit mass in this corner tavern, mumbling their skill set while I turned my head, felt up the back of my neck, and looked outside again, where the real refrain was playing itself out.  Across came kings and queens, in slow moving steps, buttoned up pant leg, crooked wagons filled to the brim with groceries, getting wet as they made their way across potholes incomplete, red light blinking and beckoning me to come outside with them.  The man in the massive cape like coat, dancing towards 53rd street in his cane led shuffle- he had more rhythm in his stride than this whole room of business formal.  The clown faced man who had just started working here, three chins at once, stuffed his face with free hors d'oeuvres, although I couldn't make them out as he did so with his big fat, overdrawn purple lips; therefore it looked like he was jamming his heavy hand into his mouth over and over - trying to eat himself while we all watched.  He'd open his mouth so wide as he did this, laughing and spitting, as he tried to fit in with the potato faced scarecrow who stood next to him, both of them not knowing what a better world looked like.  I don't even think they could hear the music, or feel the silences or details of what was going on in front of their stretched, shadowy faces inside this one little piece of the world.  The man outside with the cane bounded away from the rain, faster than it seemed possible.

I then absolutely felt the same rain on my back, and the pavement under my feet, as I went with those walking the streets.  Listening to the lullaby making sounds that mocked me with every last breath of wind I wasn't feeling myself be kissed by.  I should have sat down in the corner of the affair, jacked up my skirt around my hips and got to studying biblical verse and human behaviour, complete with a few more bottles of wine, and a gypsy brass band in my stead.  I'd have to tell the corner store girls who set up shop at the tables nearby to beat it - get home already.  The little childlike one of some indistinguishable 'spanish' - she got my blood so up, I think I would have clubbed her to death had I been offered a weapon.  She flirted and fawned like a 14 year old whose father wanted her out of the house already.  Built like the same kind of stunted child, she was far from a woman, and so exorbitantly ignorant that I think she would have grossly smiled her way through being drawn and quartered by troops, blissful and manipulating in each seam of her cheap skirt and tootsie roll face.  She was just the tip of their iceberg, the malformed mast of their ship, which didn't even have the dignity to sink, but just bob there, like the last apple at the children's party after everyone either went to sleep, or just got bored and left.  Grieving souls eating free food, and speaking badly about each other.  I wondered, how in God's name did they exist in a life outside of this one? So much of their energy went into this cattle drive, from birth to slaughter in grab bag and insurance forms, time clock self prophecy and then it hit me.  I was one of them.  I was not different.  I just knew that it was wrong and I spoke this confession, as I speak it now.  A true confession comes of the mouth, then the heart, then the offer to repay what is owed, and lastly, the promise to not do it - ever - again. I slugged my last half full glass of red, letting it flow in a beat direct to my own good heart, and confessed.

I didn't, actually.  Confess like that.  It was days later, when a healer who didn't consider himself a teacher, spoke to me plainly.  Wasted time was something that you can never ever get back.  That party, those people, that hatred I coveted and breast fed every day with loathing and condescending boundaries, it finally reached me.  Its apex, lying there in the middle of that crooked pothole, rain pelting my black eye makeup down my face, which looked up half blind to see a man covered in garbage bags who illuminated his gait and cane into my gut as he simply walked past, knowing full well what he was doing and where he was going.  Courage was a wondrous thing, and little by little it arose in me, the flame of the most buoyant lover, burning out my eyes and making my lips tingle and swollen from the bite of too many kisses.  There is only one way out, isn't there.  Stop feeding the meter, stop getting on the train, stop punishing yourself for that time you sacrificed for so long.  You did it to empathize fully with the crippled, lost and the lame.  It is time now to keep going.  To live the life that your head created years ago, before the face that you chose to be born into had you in its grasp for survival.  There is only creation of a life that will allow you to pass, of an ocean that swallows you up, and all those dangerous, bright eyed characters you once pretended had chased you down a dark street into this bar, into this office party, into this life.  Rise up, your staff and busted black eye, your legs tired from sitting, your eyes worsened from reading words that do not hold worth.  It is always in your grasp to lie down with them, to know their plight and hold their hands.  Then, the sun rises, and the rain splits your grief in two, and you hold the womb of the ocean in your eyes...alive and on fire and invigorated, and you simply turn the machine off.  And leave, never to return.  The countdown has begun, the waves boom against the strong lit windows, the troops storming the castle and in just a few more breaths, you will be up with them, the axis of all gods crossing your sight.  And your eyes, with the fullness of their own world, they just smile as they have never ever smiled before.

M. Lucia