Tonight I went to an apartment bathed in red light and drank unfamiliar punch from a red cup.

I had gotten ready hours before, in love all over again with the yearly opportunity to be someone else.

In my ribbons and scratchy dress and in that red light, for just a brief moment I felt what it is to be the way everyone else must be all the time--or at least, what I presume they are, from the vantage point of observation, from being close enough almost to touch them. I danced, laughed with my head thrown back, and someone told me I took their breath away. I felt the fullness of being free from myself.

Then the punch hit the bottom of my stomach, and I felt how empty it was, felt the sting of something acidic and unwanted hitting deep inside of me. My head swam in the heat of the red room, and I excused myself to find myself again.

Between cool air and familiar conversation, I regained my footing as best I could, feet numb in a pair of heels that pinched my toes but made me taller. I hobbled home across the cracked, unpredictable sidewalk.

Back at the house, between one stop on the adventure and another, I freed my feet from those heels and stretched my worn out toes. Around me, five of the people that I love most in the world were laughing, a little more drunk than I was, a little happier even when sober.

Just like that the spell broke. I looked down at the pair of sandals I was borrowing. They scratched my pinkie toes and made each step feel crooked and strange.

I was tired. I had been tired.

So I gave up on the fairytale, unreliable narrator and friend and guest and soul that I am, and made my way home in bare feet. I clutched my shoes in one hand, my ID card in another. In my head I drafted this piece of writing, what I've said already, and now the rest of it:

I guess I'm sorry for the weight of me, the dead weight, the way I am. I'm sorry that I can't be lighter, that I can't lose myself beneath the red lights. I'm sorry that I don't laugh more, cry less, do what I say that I'll do. I'm sorry that I didn't get in that car, grin and bear it and have an adventure that keeps me up all night. I'm sorry that I didn't want to do that, that I really and truly didn't.

I'm sorry that I said out loud what I was thinking in my head.

I'm sorry that I am not better, that I wrote this on the walk home with tears in my eyes, clutching my identity in my hands, instead of being somewhere, wherever I could've been, with you.