Dim Lighting and Why I Go Out All the Time

Every Friday and Saturday I end up doing karaoke at one of two bars in town. It’s a time during the week when I can have a few drinks and let go of whatever’s been going on over the course of the week. Whether that’s blocking out the bad news of whatever’s going on in politics or just a lot of particularly hard days in class, I can buy a beer and belt along to ABBA or Sara Bareilles and feel marginally better about my place in the world for a few hours.

For the same reason as every barfly, I started going out because I was incalculably lonely and wanted to feel that way around other people. I longed for human company without the necessary evil of having to actually be known. Despite that, when I first showed up what became a regular stop for me I was too embarrassed to admit that I was only out because I felt lonely to the cute bartender. He had beautiful hair, a kind smile so when he asked who I was meeting I lied to his beautiful face, I lied blatantly and said someone was meeting me for a first date that I was early for.

But of course no one showed up. Because I had no date. Because I was too proud to actually say yes to any date from one of my four dating apps at the time. So when I got my pity shot for being stood up, I accepted it. I declared the uselessness of the world and swallowed both the liquor and my pride, both burning the whole way down. At that point the night began to blur and at some point I was vomiting in the direction of a toilet uncertain that I knew what anything was worth, including myself.

But I went back anyway. At first it was because the beautiful bartender bore a striking resemblance to an ex I couldn’t get over, and later because it was easy. There’s a routine in loneliness, a comfort in the dim lighting of a college bar. New people floating in at all times with no harsh lighting to show where your foundation caked over the course of the day or just how smudged your lipstick is. No one goes to a bar alone because they have a surplus of people in their lives, and nobody goes back unless there’s nowhere better to be.

I knew where to sit at the bar if I wanted to only talk to the bartenders and try to convince them I was a lovable person despite evidence to the contrary. It gave me the chance to sit back and - well, not happily but certainly contentedly read through the writing of people better than me. All the while, I wondered why no one ever talked to me, ever even tried to strike up a conversation with the girl sitting alone at a bar, dressed to the nines, with no one to talk to.

In retrospect, intentionally dressing in as devastating a manner as I could before going out only exacerbated the problem, rather than diminish it. At that point, no one who came to talk to me was doing it for the right reason, skipping past my mind and heart to stare directly into the endless void of my plunging neckline, much to my dismay.

However, I wasn’t the only person to keep coming back, night after night. Even though I was certain I didn’t want anyone to talk to, I kept politely saying hello to the same people, asking after them, and answering their questions in turn. I didn’t expect them to ever remember who I was, let alone whether or not I ever said I graduated from college (untrue then, untrue now) or if I even had family in the area. But, the thing about the same people wandering through your life over and over again is that despite that wandering, there’s a tendency not to forget the girl who showed up in a plaid miniskirt and fur coat on a Tuesday night in December, as it turns out.

Suddenly, I had a new problem, namely in the fact that I had pretended to care about people for so long that they thought I was a genuine person with genuine emotions and opinions about their lives. As far as I was concerned, the people with the gall to speak to me were just as lonely as me, just as unworthy of my attention as I desperately reached out to people online instead of in person. It’s a lot easier to delude yourself when you can’t read a person’s facial expressions.

A year later, I see people regularly. I’m going to one of their places tonight as an excuse to see people I’ve come to really care about and also continue a creative project at the same time.

I’ve definitely wasted a lot of money trying to reach out and grasp human connection, but I can’t say I’ve wasted my time.