in parentheses

Arthur Sadrian is a student writer and novelist. He has received the Plum Tree Tavern Best of Year award for poetry, is an Iowa Young Writers’ Studio alumnus, and is a top 1% seller on Amazon Kindle. In his spare time, he likes to edit for literary magazines, listen to a variety of music genres, and bike without direction. He will be attending the University of California, Berkeley in the fall of 2023.

---

Aftergrad

When time slows down I feel like I’m tripping.

Those first few hours develop in unitary increments. Twelve for the vodka. Thirty for the pizza. Five through the tube. We enter Farringdon, pass up an eight-pound Uber, walk fourteen minutes in dress shoes, sing God Save the Queen twice, and meet twenty early goers in an alleyway. Beyond, 21 Savage echoes through the gaping venue entrance, barred by four hulking bouncers who strike silhouettes through smoke machines like trees in a wildfire.

No ID? No entry. I don’t care what the host told you.

Trevor contemplates a bribe of forty, but, on account of a disagreement over whether to pay before or after security, he is cast away like dirty water. As such, we slip into the sixties. Sixty minutes home. Sixty to Uber round trip. Sixty scoldings for needlessly spending all of that money. Multiplicities upon multiplicities, melding into solidarity, into the one thing that continues to matter. 

The one night that continues to matter.

            Now we’re in. Heat and haze meld together, a buzzing hive of bodies packed into a too-small basement. We dance like churning water, figures fluctuating through figures as we bump, jostle, and divide. To enact revenge is to fish during a tornado, and tonight I dawn my rod. How many hands to turn a betrayer jealous? How many factoring in her indifference? My awkwardness? Girls. Girls. Girls. Girls I like. Girls I know. I reel them in, let each dress spin like a paper umbrella against my calves, and our hips are grooving as if connected by ball joints. Now I’m ignoring her; now I’m talking to someone else; now I cast a furtive glance to see if she’s looking. It makes little sense to assume that someone who lost interest would miraculously regain it which is why, tonight, I’m dancing with delusion.

I drag my feet; strain beyond my monologue for conversation. Something in the ambiance must have broken my watch because moments shrink into minuscule increments, such that every dialogue passes before it can conduct the leap from one integer to the next. I keep reassuring myself that the big hand signifies minutes, not hours. That this dimly lit basement bar is not drawing me into some bizarre time warp. That I am not prolonged by necessity, stagnating beneath the word ‘last’. But this is no picturesque farewell. This is a basement with music and an open bar that serves drinks to minors, and these are my classmates, many of whom I cannot bring myself to appreciate. I’m about to ask my judgy friends whether I should flip that girl from yearbook class off when I realize they like that girl from yearbook class. I told everyone that I came to aftergrad to render honest goodbyes upon unsuspecting victims, but the persistence of reputation holds me captive.

Even midnight–heat electrified in the drunkenness of the dancers–cannot remedy my sitting, sweating, sober self. Hemmed like cattle into a side booth, I swelter in an infrared frenzy of sweat particles that are neither mine nor pleasant to inhale.

“It goes by faster than you could imagine,” I tell the juniors. “Head up and focus. Remember your friends. Remember what you want to keep.” My words are the melancholy echoes of predecessors to whom I paid little heed, such that I become the embodiment of what every rising senior forgets. In a year, they too will learn that good times slip between our fingers like minnows in muddy water, that memories carry an embellished sense of nostalgia, and that retrospect will inevitably truncate months into minutes. In a year, it will be the “could do’s” and the “should do’s” that punctuate the “have done’s,” and the “I wish I’s” that outnumber the “I remember’s.” Maybe they’ll grumble and cry and reminisce. Maybe they’ll accept their predicament. I suspect all will eventually gravitate towards my same hollow words.

When the dance floor stops seething, I return to its bowels and move amidst a parted cloud of stragglers and second-life songs. No longer is there compression enough to spark lightning, so the rest decide their energy better spent pushed up against solid surfaces. I see them on walls, against pillars, on sofas; bodies on bodies, lips on lips: they find a new groove in one another. My groove emerges only in the feeble lyrics of musicians we’re all sick of hearing.

By 1:20 am it’s over. The bouncers are circling. Like sheepdogs, they reign us towards the door in perfunctual sweeping motions. When this hardly shepherds the intoxicated mob, lights are turned on, the music is cut, and we blink as features suddenly protrude from our silhouettes.

Only now does awareness dawn upon the crowd, as the light has offered clarity to even the drunkest among us.

“Goodbye!” we say.

We embrace lunchmates. We high-five lab partners. We force sentimentality into acquaintances–not for lack of meaningful friendships–but because these are the people we know we’ll never see again. They are the classmates and lunch buddies, the “I like you’s, but we probably won’t be seeing each other again’s.” University is their guillotine, and every turn marks the swish of a person gone forever, a face cast into a basket of high school memories where it will lie buried in the passage of a lifetime. Mounting the entrance stairs feels like exiting a morgue. I should only hope its contents do not disintegrate.

---