Leaving and Listening to Parties
Written by Meg RuoccoThe first time I snuck out of a party I was seven. You read that right—out of, not into.It was Christmas Eve, 2003. I wore a blue velvet dress that crinkled when my uncle picked me up to hug me and say hello. He put me on his shoulders and pointed to the sky from the porch, telling me to look for Santa. I didn’t see Santa, but I definitely saw Rudolph’s nose. Sources later speculated that it was more likely the blinking red light from an electric tower, but I know what I saw.The house sparkled with that rare energy of family members who get along with each other, and I walked through a maze of knees and hands holding cups of glug—a mixture of rum, red wine, and spices that made the room smell like cinnamon. I wove in between groups, walking from aunt to uncle, cousin to cousin, listening and laughing along with the stories I loved hearing then as much as I had at every other Christmas.“We stole the horses and rode! No saddle, just grasping manes with our little hands and clenching our teeth-”“So he pulled down his pants, bent over, and said to your uncle Steve: ‘Does this boil look malignant to you?’”“Your Nana looked out the kitchen window to see your mother—a baby at the time, mind you—in a basket tied to jump-ropes being slowly lowered to the ground by your aunts. They had ‘Fire Drill Day’ at school apparently-”I remember feeling like all the stories blended together at one point. The rooms became too loud, and I needed a break. So I left. Not, like, left left, I was only seven. I walked upstairs to the room where all the coats lay on the bed, and an electric piano sat in the corner. It smelled like wool and the inside of closets. I listened to the far-away stories still being told and the muffled laughter while I plunked out the notes to “Three Blind Mice” on the piano.I didn’t know how to put words to it then, but I felt it. I felt the calm, the peace, knowing that that joy was not my responsibility to maintain. Knowing that, in that moment, there was a pocket of the world existing completely without me and it was this beautiful, happy thing. It meant that there were other beautiful, happy pockets—lots of pockets, probably, like cargo-pants-level pockets—of the world in which joy exists, in complete disregard to me. Happiness isn’t limited to my own ability or inability to create it. It exists outside of my own reality, which means good things are happening everywhere. Even if I can’t see them. Even if those good things include a story about a suspicious butt abscess.
The last time I snuck out of a party was a couple weeks ago. The subjects of the far-away stories I heard that night were different from the ones I heard at that Christmas party all those years ago. These were stories of new loves, botched biology tests, whether it was worth it to go to the game tomorrow. The stories were different, yeah, but that happiness was the same. My friends found me in yet another room with the coats (weird how every house has one of those), reading a book I’d found on the host’s nightstand and humming along to the baseline of the song “Dynamite” as it played on the speakers in the living room. What can I say? That song really holds up.