I lumbered past the outstretched legs and indifferent glances, unsure of where I was going or what I was looking for. Showing her usual indifference to the schedules the rest of us lived by, my favorite party mate Heather was still on Sanibel Island. I was even denied the bittersweet pleasure of the sight of my eternal crush Virginia, who, as evidenced by the absence of her boyfriend Tad’s GTO from its customary spot next to his twin brother’s Trans Am, had already left. Tad and brother Bill always arrived together at parties for maximum effect, but left separately, depending on whether they thought they had a better chance of getting lucky on site or back home.

I guess I basically wanted someone to acknowledge my existence, my relevance, but all the faces I passed were either too tranquillized or too preoccupied to engage a fossil like me. The dark, narrow smokiness became even more oppressive, and, not being a pill person, I couldn’t just take my medicine and descend into the morass with the rest of them. My objective became escape, but, in the face of the endless dark winding clotted with low lying crowds, even that proved difficult until I was finally able to wrench open a set of glass doors and stumble out onto the patio.

With the full moon and fresh air, things seemed incomparably clearer outside than in, and I rather theatrically recovered myself, stomping around and taking deep breaths, stopping suddenly when I realized there was someone sitting cross-legged on the cement picnic table across from me. The embarrassment I felt when I recognized Katie quickly evaporated when I realized that she, like everyone else that night, hadn’t been paying the slightest bit of attention to me.