This room

I had the privilege (no sarcasm) of attending a meeting / brainstorming session last night held by the editors and principal contributors of a local Bcn culture publication. The way I've been feeling this week, it's hardly surprising that I was overwhelmed by the large personalities of those in attendance. I found myself mute, crossing my arms and legs and closing myself to the world that everyone else inhabits, maintaining a fairly consistent expression of "I'm interested but I'm not going to try too hard." This happens to me sometimes, this kind of self-sabotage that makes me seem dry and philistine. I have things to say, but they get stuck in the same chest cavity where I store all of my anxiety. 

The meeting lasted 3 hours, but its slow, nonlinear progression started to feel like an endless steppe. Suddenly, I hadn't been in that room--a cozy space with white walls, dim light, red candles, and circular cruise ship windows that offered a view into the alcohol-filled kitchen--for a mere few hours. I had been there all day, perhaps my entire life, just sitting, hardly giving any more signs of life than the plastic chair beneath me that seemed to have become as much a part of me as an arm or a leg. It suddenly occurred to me that I might never leave this room. There was no June 6th flight to Chicago. There was no graduation. There was no Masters in Public Policy and Foreign Service exam. There was just this room, these lime green pillows, these half-empty cans of Estrella beer, this comfortable smell of cigarettes, this tall man in the bright red shirt whom I cannot stop thinking about for just one second of my whole goddamned day. Overtaken by romantic angst and cabin fever, I imagined myself drinking all of the bottles of Vichy Catalan sitting in the kitchen in a dramatic act of self-cleansing, just drinking and drinking them until I had bathed all of my organs and rotten emotions in expensive sparkling water. 

The meeting let out and I felt like a newborn who had just left the comfort of the womb to enter prematurely the incomprehensible and sometimes cruel reality that governs our society, and when I was safely at home in my room I began to cry like a baby, although I am 20 and really have nothing to cry about.