Ouroboros 

Everyone gathers around the table, and I pour the drinks.  We clink our glasses together and make a toast to nothing in particular, something improvised that gets a couple cheap laughs.  Peanut butter whiskey mixes with Coca-Cola that bubbles over the rim of my red solo cup.  It spills onto the table, another night at Caden and Braden’s apartment.  I sip the frothy, mixed beverage as I clean up my mess with several paper towels; Trenten rinses his shot glass off in the sink.   

There is a pile of shoes to the right of the end table, a noticeable amount being dirty, white converse.  Marcus excitedly takes his fourth shot.  There is a movie playing in the background, eventually one of us will pick up the remote, stumbling, and turn off the TV.  Some early 2000s rock song is echoing softly from a Bluetooth speaker set atop the empty, white microwave.  My wallet and keys rest haphazardly on a section of bar nuzzled in between the couch and cat tree; Diego takes a swig from his water bottle.   

Beside the dying Bluetooth speaker, now playing a show tune from “Dear Evan Hanson” or “Tick, Tick... Boom!” or something, lies a couple scoops of flour inside of a plastic container.  Over six months ago now probably, that flour was used to make a couple pizzas for a night like this.  Trenten and Kenadi rolling out the dough and peppering it with sauce and cheese and pepperoni, Caden and I advocated for pineapple.  Have we really been doing this for that long? 

There is a white light bouncing off the kitchen floor, littered with alcohol and confessions.  Everyone is sitting crisscrossg on the tile or atop the washer and dryer; Braden is asleep on the couch.  My head is spinning slowly, as if it were being rocked in a cradle, how my grandmother used to sing lullabies to me in her brown leather recliner.  There is no world outside of this room, outside of this apartment.  There is nobody else out there living or driving through the night, at least for myself, the entire world is present here and now.   

I go to use the bathroom, everyone yelling at me to please shut the door this time.  I lean my head on the cabinet above the porcelain throne, grateful for its existence so that I don’t shower the bathroom in piss as I try to catch my balance.   I wash my hands off in the sink and shake them dry, I look in the mirror, man I look like hell.  I walk back out into the auditorium of a kitchen and slump down against the cabinet beneath the sink.  Everyone is exchanging stories like roll call, Rhett is talking Alyssa’s ears off, she isn’t exactly interested in what he has to say, but she doesn’t want to be rude.  Caden looks like something is wrong, but he won’t say what.  Justin grabs another Angry Orchard from the refrigerator, Caden makes sure he doesn’t keel over and die. 

Sid eventually trots in stumbling, laughing to himself, and saying “bro” a lot.  Somebody asks a question, I don’t remember who or what, but I begin talking about something everyone there has heard before.  Old stories and regrets crawl up the back of my tank top like insects as they bury themselves beneath my skin.  Everyone goes quiet for a moment, before they give me advice as they always do, and I smile.  A single tear dancing down the side of my face, a good start, headed in the direction of somewhere. 

It’s funny to think about, all the nights and early mornings spent here, doing the exact same thing, events folding out in the same order.  The same jokes told that always manage to elicit new laughs, and the little changes that do happen.  Some nights we’ll throw on a video game, Super Smash or DDR, sometimes we’ll get dinner before and other times we’ll bring our own, every now and then we’ll make lasagna, but overall, it is always the same.  There is a certain comfort in it, the repetition of good friends and nice places.  Every other week or so, we’ll joke about us needing to hurry up and drink again, but I don’t think it’s about the alcohol.  It’s not the booze or what’s to eat that separates everything worth worrying about from the singular current moment.  From sitting on that kitchen floor with everybody else, it feels like home more so than my own bed.   

It will repeat again and again, there will be references to past nights with different people, when Jack would show up before he moved away or those few times that we did it at Trenten’s apartment, but the feeling will always be the same.  We’ll do this often until eventually people begin moving away; I’m not sure who will be the next to say goodbye, but I know that those nights will lose a bit of their luster.  Eventually the world will have to tell me that those days are over, existing only as a looping memory constantly playing in the back of my mind.  Eventually I will have to accept the fact that all of this just might be temporary, but tonight, among all of my friends gathered before me, it is forever.