Not so small talk

I'm always self-conscious at dinner parties. Dinner parties like this, where I kind of know people, but only enough to add a shade of warmth to our small talk. All the eating and drinking makes me anxious as well.

I'm always worried I will eat and drink too much. So I eat very little and smoke too much, punctuating awkward statements and questions by igniting ciggarette after ciggarette.

I get talking to the only other girl who looks as left out as I feel. She tells me about the last decades in berlin, what it was like when she was growing up here, the techno club she liked when she was 16, the impact of squat culture and gentrification and she is studying media and she wants to make a documentary about her Jewish ancestry in Greece. It is a somewhat unknown history she says. I ask her if she has read the book everything is illuminated and immediately after, hate myself for the question.

She hasn't read the book but she has seen the film. I explain the book is very different, probably in too much detail,almost apologising for it. We end up talking about concentration camps and the complications in how to present them sensitively without sanitizing their tragedy. I say I've never been brave enough to visit one, but that I went to a slave fort in Accra.

And she's asking me questions and I'm answering them, but also wondering why, how did we end up talking about this at a diner party, and we could crash another conversation, I think they're talking about living in London over there, or otherwise we could talk to those two about their new office seating plan.

Is she as uncomfortable as I am? Is she even interested, or is she just asking questions to be polite? We are interrupted by the first girl in berlin I ever fancied. She never took me seriously, and there is a girl who says we met before in London but she looks embarrased when my face makes it so clear that I don't remember, and next to her I notice a dj who once kicked me off a stage ( I wasn't meant to be there,) at a music festival ( but one of the backing dancers had taken me on with her) but she doesn't remember me.

why would she?

And then not long after, the girl I'm talking to leaves. Doesn't say goodbye to me, or anyone else I think. Two more people I know arrive and our conversation is all quite silly. But I don't' feel playful anymore., so as the others put gears in motion to go clubbing and make a big night of it, I grab my things call him with his phone off, and him who doesn't answer, and within an hour I'm in bed, wishing I stayed home.