Eleanor Roosevelt once said "Do one thing everyday that scares you", but I wonder how often she went unescorted to parties full of strangers. I intellectually grasp that this is not exactly swimming with the sharks, but I think I would almost prefer to take my chances in the water. At least then I know what to expect. Here, the closest connection is a friend of a friend of someone I knew in high school. The person who invited me was a friend of a couple girls I dated in high school. It had been nearly a decade since last I saw him, when we exchanged ten words outside a concert. I only got an invite because I happened to be on his friends list on a social networking site.

I enter through the open door and hover around a group of people pouring drinks in the kitchen in celebration of Flag Day (the invitation suggested we wear flag related outfits - I am wearing flag underwear to get under the radar with a technicality - but no one does). In fact, I am offered a shot before I am offered an introduction. Tom, the host, then greets me as though we'd been the best of friends for years and I don't question this welcome, if contrived, familiarity.

Released from his company when he attaches to another guest, I immediately do what I have otherwise disparaged in concept, darting over to a stack of books on an end table and idly flipping through the newest David Sedaris book if just so I do not look as horribly ill at ease as I am. Maybe, if someone sees me browsing this, they will comment that they too love David Sedaris and have I read this or that? Then I will be able to have a conversation on comfortable terms for a little while. No one approaches in the two minute I can legitimately look at the book before I become unconscionably queer to them ("Is he reading that book? In the middle of a party, he's reading? Who invited him?") and I wander to the next community island that can sustain me in the ocean of unfamiliarity.

It is said that one hoping to chat with the broadest swath of a party is well advised to sit next to the food, but I make my way there if just because a cupcake seemed a likely enough balm to my discomfort. While I nibbled, I watched other people talking and politely eavesdropped into conversations in hopes something would be said that would allow me to speak, though it mostly centered on menstruation and douching. I commented, in agreement with the woman speaking, that douching tends to upset the delicate vagina ecosystem and should be avoided.

"Since you now know so much about my vagina," she said, "I should tell you that my name is Sten."

Once we shook hands, I silent designated Sten as my new friend until someone took me away from her, a title which simply meant I would gravitate near her should cupcakes or conversation run out. She wasn't aware that I'd appointed her my friend for the duration of the party, as I never felt the need to inform her that I was quite so socially maladroit.

Tom appears then and introduces me to a scruffy yet shorthaired guy in amber sunglasses that would fit an actor in a seventies cop serial.

"Oh, I know him," I assure Tom, then turn to the guy. "You're [Other]Zack."

The guy looks me over and I see that he doesn't recognize me.

"We met..." how do I properly put this in context? "We met through Melissa."

The glasses obscure his eyes somewhat, but I think they flare with a bit of fear as he puts together the when and wherefore that he does not want me to reveal to his friends. "Then you know Mike?" he asks and I am almost certain there is a grain of nervousness asking me not to embarrass him.

"Right, I know him through Melissa, too." I also know that OtherZack hooked up with Melissa that first night they met and, if I recall correctly, tried to get cuddly with her (a cardinal sin in her book). Shortly thereafter, he purloined the daily take from the theater at which he was then manager, along with Mike's van, leaving the state. After this point, it is all mythologized. Some stories say he followed the coast downward until he hit Virginia (why Virginia? No one says), where the van sputtered its last. Others say he headed straight for Vegas for no other reason than that it is Vegas. For a while, my small group of friends was torn between predicting he would be found as a bloated corpse floating down the Hudson River or deeply in debt to mobsters after having splurged his cash on hookers and drugs. The real story was nowhere near as exciting and so it has largely been forgotten. He was found months after his departure because he wanted to be found. The van was not. He came back and, I believe, replaced the stolen money. I do not even think charges were pressed such was the consensus that he had punished himself enough in his travels. All of this was years ago and should be left to the past.

We chat a little longer, though he mostly directs his comments at Sten, and then he disappears into the night for a job. I'm honestly a little sad to see him go, because he at least gave direction to my conversation. In tenuously knowing his back story, I feel that I belong here.

I stay fixed to this table, refusing to leave just because I feel discomfort. I will desensitize myself to this awkwardness, no matter how much I want to flee to a quiet corner. A man, quite drunk, tries to explain various drinking games to the table. I play along only because Sten and her friend made clear that they did not wish to start doing shots because cards told them to. Despite this, I cringe when the man informs me, owing to the hearts on my card, that I would have to take a shot were we playing this for real. I do not think anyone else notices this reaction, too wrapped up in their own cards. Tom comes over and plays along for a bit, seeming so utterly charming and in his element that I cannot even envy him.

I didn't used to be like this. I had more confidence and social fluidity. Put me in a room and I quickly find my level and am in the nucleus of a group, making new friends. This malleability and extroversion was the punchline to a dozen of my family's jokes. I don't know quite what quashed it. Was it that I became too reliant on Emily as my perpetual social buffer and grew to fear social situations without her at my side or is that as pat an answer as I think it is? Objectively, I am better and more interesting than when I was a teenager and I intellectually know that I have nothing to fear, but this anxiety and nervousness paralyzes me.

Much later, after gazing into the kitchen tightlipped, watching people chatting, I flounce onto the sofa next to Sten and say, "I've been asocially watching people for the last... forty minutes. So could I just sit here near you and pretend we are talking? Or actually talk?"

She seems happy to actually talk and asks about my job. I rattle on for a bit about the job I just left and the one which I hope to come to soon, going beyond simple pleasantries and pretending that she really in my new friend. To her immense credit, she acts as though this is true. I admire the curliness of her hair and the sculpted shape of her lips as she explains that she likes her job, except that it keeps her in the Hudson Valley.

"There is nowhere else I would rather be," I assure her, "and one of my greatest fears is that I will only be offered jobs hours away and will have to choose between living comfortably so far from the reasons I work in the first place, or staying near my root and struggling constantly."

Our conversation transcends a quarter of an hour and seems poised to go further when her ride says she is tired and drunk and wishes to go home. Sten smiles at me, apologizes, and leaves me to my own devices once more.

Fortified with this positive interaction, I float around the party for a while, still observing but doing so more actively. A pair of women enter the front door and the taller of the two immediately earns my focus. Ilana - as I later learn is her name - is shy and genuinely beautiful. Like "across the room, crowd parts, soft lit spotlight" beautiful. The kind of radiance painters work futilely to capture, so they just throw a halo over the person's head. She has long dark hair and brown eyes so dark they looked black, light caramel skin that looks good to touch. She smiles easily and frequently, looking at everyone as though she were in love with them. Better, she rode that line between self-consciousness and humility, as though it hadn't occurred to her that she might be exceedingly easy on the eyes.

I watch her interact, trying to place her and suss out her story. She cuddles up to Tom a few times and I am ready to label them a couple, if just because two such immediately magnetic people should stick together, but something in their manner and Ilana's wandering around the party signals that they are close but perhaps not lovers. If I am wrong, I want any of my future children to marry theirs, gender compatibility be damned.

Yet, as socially adept and liquid as I find them both, I don't think to envy them. I just want to orbit in their proximity, to be seen by association as even a satellite to their world. I want to know them on a deeper level, to be half as important to them as they are to me in this voyeuristic moment.

Everyone is ushered out into the parking lot of the townhouse, where a familiar boy had readied what looks to be a magic show in the darkness. Then, he lights the mesh ball in his hands and it goes up in a steady flame. He contact juggles this fireball to our amusement, then moves onto juggling flaming clubs. The neighbors come out to watch and someone whispers that these are the ones who so often call the police to shut down parties, but they are oddly enchanted watching a twentysomething play with fire feet from their cars. With the glowing of the Mid-Hudson Bridge in the background, this tableau takes on an almost magical quality and, as just a member of the crowd, a feel oddly liberated to be more myself and joke with the people near me.

Soon after the show, I feel that I had been uncomfortable in this fun situation too long and that it is time to go home. I say goodbye to those few who remain with whom I shared any interaction. While still trapped in the crowded kitchen, the guy who owns the townhouse put his arm around me and told me that he wanted to be my friend in "real life" because I seemed laidback.

"Thank you, but I have actually been terrified through most of the party, since I didn't actually know anyone," I confide, sure that he is a bit drunk.

"See, that's even cooler."

I laugh at the inebriated logic of this and wonder if he might be right.

Soon in Xenology: Engagement. Maria. Hanniel.

last watched: King of Kong
reading: A Short History of Nearly Everything
listening: Alas I Cannot Swim

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