Accidentally went into a restaurant for dinner in which I realized too late all the men were wearing suits. I tore off my two layers of wool, hot from walking, and sat there in very shabby jumper with a t-shirt over it which I sleep in, pressing slices of bread into a bowl of olive oil, reading the menu. I felt so tired and overcome by thoughts I could barely read menuese: a first-world problem. My elbows through the sapped weave of my jumper stood on sharp crumbs on the white cloth.
The waiter was an exhausted but mildly gleaming Woody Allen man with a soft sunken pavlova of hair not quite reaching the centre of his scalp. He brought me wine. I polished the excess oil into my fingernails and admired them by candlelight. At the next table a woman about a decade older than me was unleashing her ribald laugh for the delectation of her companion, even older still. She glanced at me over his shoulder and began to whisper. Her eyes were fixed not on my face but on my peeling jumper, my bony wrists thrust from it like over-plucked hens. “Unglaublich,” she said, “unbelievable.” I am shy and had stood outside the teeming with smiles restaurant for fully five minutes working up the courage to come in. But I let my eyes fix hers to let her know that she’d been understood. She looked away. It was almost fun. I watched her for several minutes while she looked everywhere but at my face. The power one gains by being (sometimes, not always) unafraid to look someone in the eye. The uninterestingness of power except as a kind of parlour trick, or party favour. The banality of parties, at which everyone who’s best dressed can resemble a tricked-out and groomed dog, leashed and booted, with a lampshade on their head.
I wish I were a bulb, tonight. Either a “Glühbirne” or else the kind that grows under the soil. I wish I were a better dressed kind of human, or that I sometimes combed my hair. I wish I were 21 and radiant. I wish I drank more.
