last dance for me

I don’t know their names and they don’t know mine but they ask me to take pictures with them and I say sure. A woman gets smashed. A man carries her away. Another man gets drunk, and his friend grabs him and tells him to shut the fuck up. In another corner, a girl takes comfort in the embrace of a married man. “The party won’t be the same without you,” a woman says to me as I motion to leave, and so I reply, “Well, in that case, do think of me in your heart.”

Not sure when I have come to let such a phrase roll off my tongue so seemingly naturally. Since long ago I have learned that nothing feels better than the petty pride I get when I walk, with a briefcase of dignity in one hand, away from a loud pissy drunken party. Yet I was the last one to leave last night.