Blue Wristbands

My laughter is louder than theirs, my smile wider; but I’m the only one who sees the light bend, sees it flicker. It’s another Friday night and the queue stretches out before us, a duplicate code of drunken smiles, smudged mascara, windblown hair: copy, paste, copy, paste, copies.

“I missed you,” says Alicia, moving in for an embrace. I see the glitch behind her eyes, feel it in her feather touch as her arms brush over me, move through me, as though we were mere light, flickering dust particles at most.

I buffer a moment. “How was Budapest?” The girls gather around to hear.

“Well,” says Alicia, running her fingers through her pixie cut.

We advance in the queue as she buzzes about the six orgasms she had in one night; there’s a gleam in her eyes, a beetle’s iridescence, though she’s recited this story before. How is it that she smiles in all the same places? sighs at all the right times?

Scratched disk, she’s a scratched disk, but there’s something authentic about the monotony, the disconnect; maybe she feels it too? Maybe she projects her inner world on every blank screen, and tonight that means us.

Music slips out of the club and slides down the queue where it borrows our lips, our tongues. Cake, something, something, cake.

“I like songs about cake,” I say.

“It’s not actually about cake,” says Betty, and the others chirrup like crickets.

“Oh, I didn’t know it was a euphemism.”

Someone’s always explaining things to me. I’m forever stuck in the introductory world, tutorial island, surrounded by monotonous NPCs that don’t compute; I see their programming fog up their glass eyes, hear the scripted drawl wear their voices thin. I disengage, space out, OK, OK, OK, and the speech bubble finally dissipates above their heads. Disconnect, I feel only disconnect, and there’s no more magic in my fading inebriety, no elixir in a dried-up Blue Lagoon.

           I take a call, just a moment. Alex’s voice is distant but deep, grainy but steady over the line. I change worlds for an instant, and the girls fade into the misty haze, the bending lights, their chitter-chatter like a cicada’s song.

           “Are you hungry?” he asks.

High heels click like a keyboard, and I look over my shoulder. My girls, they’re my girls; they snake their way through the queue like a centipede before disappearing inside. My skin crawls with an inkling, an itch, but I lag after them, I hang up on Alex.

People trickle in through the door, flashing their wrists at security. A streak of blue, MP bar blue, elixir in their eyes. Blue wristbands. They all have blue wristbands.

I hover outside, loading, lagging, before I break down. A streak of blue, and my bar’s completely empty; there’s no trace of magic here, not in this fluttering disconnect.

What does a blue wristband mean to you? It means finding yourself alone in a queue at two a.m., discovering your mascara isn’t waterproof; it means sitting on a street corner, cold tiles against your thighs, waiting for the thick growl of your boyfriend’s car engine. Alex arrives in black athleisure, his car covered in bird droppings, and I climb in, closing myself up in this capsule; the chair is rough, the seatbelt smooth, the air warm, tangible, real.

Alex’s light doesn’t bend, it doesn’t flicker, his eyes don’t glitch as he examines my face, his touch doesn’t flinch as he leans over the clutch and envelops me in a cotton embrace. I feel like more than mere light, mere liquid, even as I melt in his arms; I’m opaque, I have substance, even though he sees through me.

There’s no bug in his voice when he asks if I’m OK.

           I’m not meant for friendship, I say, I’m not a social person. My apparent extroversion, and even eccentricity, only accentuate my introversion; they suggest that my solitude is absolute. I’m so definitively alone that I’ve externalised my inner world, my imagination, and what others would only dare do in privacy, I’d do in a crowded room because I retain my privacy here in this sea of people; they are midnight dew, they evaporate; there’s no substance to these smoky silhouettes, no substance to this world.

Green traffic lights pool across the black road like a circuit board, trees glitch outside the window. Alex’s left hand clings firmly to the wheel, all five fingers curved around it, slightly whiter at the edges from the grip, the contact; the wheel doesn’t flicker in his hand, reality doesn’t stutter.

“Why do you feel like that?” he asks, and there’s something solid about his voice, there’s weight in his frown.

My imagination and reality have long converged; I don’t really distinguish between the two, and I allow the former to define and often create the latter. It makes sense; the tangible begins as an idea, an urge, an intention. And it is there, in that space between the tangible and intangible, where we decide reality. This convergence, however, renders my mind more palpable than the ghosts that dance around me; my mind is gravity, grounded, and they’re all helium balloons.

I didn’t say all that aloud, though, I didn’t say all that aloud and still it sits in the car with us; even the unspoken takes form here, substance.

“You’re nice,” he says, “and you deserve friends.” His words are palpable, soft as cotton stuffing, and as red lights pool into the car, he finally looks over at me, interlocks his fingers with mine. White grip. Contact. This is tangible, this little world of ours is tangible. His eyes don’t sparkle with that beetle iridescence, don’t cloud over, don’t gleam; they’re firm, dark, solid, and there’s something reliable there, stable, something to lean against.

Outside our steel and rubber capsule, a woman floats along the pedestrian crossing; her scarf flutters in the wind, two dizzying blue balloons hover above her. 21.

“I wonder how old she is,” I say.

“Twelve,” says Alex.

I reach over and squeeze his thigh. This is my blue wristband: him, here, now.