It’s a Saturday night and you spontaneously decide to go clubbing on your own. You’ve made no plans but love to take yourself out on adventures in no one else’s company than your own. You appreciate your own individualism and don’t rely on the validation of other people in order to feel fulfilled. After you’ve hyped yourself up a little by dancing to your Underwear Jam - playlist, you look in the mirror for one last check and realise one thing: you look amazing and the world is yours.
The club is exactly like you imagined, but with less elderly people suffering from Madonna-syndrome. The night is young and so are, in fact now you realise, all of its people. No cougars in what seems like two grams of fabric, compensated by a ton of makeup, are in sight, nor are there any wrinkly hands to be seen when you look below everyone’s hip level. One or two steps into the room, you notice that the bar itself is just as safe too: your shoes stay attached to your feet no matter how close you’re getting to the otherwise sticky bar area, and even the rest of the floor is so clean that you could easily lick a spilled drink off it if you wanted to save some money. You obviously don’t, because someone just offered to pay for your drink after you made him laugh for fifteen minutes straight. After your spontaneous and quick encounter, he respects your wish to be alone and doesn’t buy you another drink with the intention to make you feel obliged to follow him home tonight. You depart with a smile and a buzzing head.
The longer you stay in the club - and oh look it’s already been three hours! Time flies when you’re having fun with zero anxieties! - the more you notice how every song is carefully picked by the DJ to minimize his guest’s risk of ending up in a mental ward after listening to the same rhythm for six hours. Some people are dressed appropriately, some inappropriately. In fact, the term “appropriate clothing” seems to magically disappear from the dictionary as soon as you enter this new, zero-judgement realm. You yourself, are dressed comfortably but without compromising on taste. Taste being so subjective and therefore respected, that you could’ve walked in with Ugg boots and velvet, flared trousers, and no one would’ve given you any other looks than smiles of acknowledgement and approval. Someone compliments you on your snakeskin leggings, without forcing you into a ten minute small talk session about where you got them from three years ago. If heaven is a place on earth, you might have just found it.
After a little dance on your own and the occasional, happy stranger, you start searching for the bar again. Someone points it out to you without following you and you kindly thank him for his help. As soon as you spot it, you comfortably make your way towards it without anyone bumping into you or getting angry for touching their elbow in a crowded room. There’s not even a single bum-slap on the way there. After a comfortable stroll through wonderland, the bartender kindly meets your eyes to make sure you know you’ve got his undivided attention. You go for a whiskey and coke and get charged exactly what you should pay for a deliberately mediocre beverage in a plastic cup. There’s always a time and a place for intelligently crafted drinks and this wasn’t one of them. You and the bartender nod in agreement of this transaction and you return to the dance floor.
One contactless tap and a sip of your drink later, and you’re happily dancing on your own again. Your eyes are closed as you’re moving to the beat, since you fully trust your surroundings. You even leave your cup on a table near you, which doesn’t get spiked at any point during the night, and neither drunk by a prepubescent teen with a fake ID who was hoping for some free drugs. Another half an hour into your solo dance and you start feeling a little tired. A peak at your phone tells you that it’s 1am, and without feeling the need to stay out longer to meet the etiquette of a proper club session, you decide to book a taxi home. Unfortunately, your phone dies a second after you check your phone. However, there’s no need to worry. The nice guy from earlier who bought you a drink happens to stand right next to you, about to leave as well, and you decide to share a taxi together. Not only do you save each other some money, but you also have an intellectually stimulating chat about Marxism, and the environmental and human impact of the fashion industry. Before it’s time to say goodbye, you spend the last couple of minutes of the journey reciting jokes from some stand up comedians you’ve been into lately. You come home safely, and have enough energy to properly wash your face and put your PJs on. Life is too short to suffer from the pain a left on bra brings. Neither of you fantasise about each other when you go to bed as you’re fulfilled and self-sufficient people, who appreciate the pleasure of an unexpected exchange without holding on to a forced and imaginative romance. You fall asleep and dream about fighting human sized pigeons. You win today.
Photo by Sarthak Navjivan on Unsplash