"I live of what the others don't know about me."

A crowd of fifteen comes for dinner. They arrive in groups and couples or one by one, smile, bring offers, say how they're glad to be here and later say they enjoy the food and drinks. There's a good dog who ritually needs to drink water. They need louder music and if neglected become silent and eager to go, the conversations skew in blind directions. They never know where to put out the cigarettes. They flirt and talk louder to overcome the din of the music and they change tracks over and over. Someone asks me absurd questions, like what I am doing with my life right now or what am I going to do tomorrow. They're all Libi's friends. Libi keeps saying she wants to hide in the bathroom to fuck. Or suck at least. Some of them conveys subtle hostility or disapproval, because they know things. I feel ridiculously out of place and uninterested and alone. I look at girls' legs. I enjoy the moments of seriousness in face to face talks at the corners of the party, and the apparent friendliness of interested inquiries. When essentially all the dialogs, the arguments, the conversations are completely useless. Solicitous and useless. "Indeed" and "precisely" are used so often precisely when one should use a word of opposite meaning. The unexpected exchange with the other girl by the biblical name who said: "one has to downplay herself to be with the others. In the end I came to accept this." That amazed me. We stay out on the terrace and inside, making groups whose balance constantly shifts. At one a.m. one says she'll go and a moment later everyone goes, judging by the movement near the exit the moment proper. It makes me sad and relieved. They leave behind a mountain of empty bottles, dirty dishes, surprising silence of the turned down volume. I remember how I used to be disappointed by parties that ended early. Now we all have jobs or at least they do. In the morning I will wash the dishes using a table dragged behind the sink as a buffer. I get out to the terrace before it starts raining again and I feel sorry for the plants. Nobody cared for the plants, it was a useless party without caring for the plants sleeping in the dark right before our eyes, standing there in the dark, growing from pots of dirt, the creatures to whom I devote the most attention and who bear in them the most of my pathetic rhetoric disillusions -- nobody asked anything about them even if few had even flowers on them, and others where just sticking out of the turf as if interested in the dyslexic world out there.

Last new years' eve I got drugged against my will. I was at this fancy party in Bologna, entouraged around a celeb italian rockstar who is engaged with an ex-girlfriend of mine, and I didn't know nobody except her and him, and wandering around dark rooms with my mouth dry I accepted this sip from a girl's bottle of water. I kind of drank a quarter of what was left in the bottle. Later, since I was still thirsty, I went around, found her and got myself another large swallow from the bottle again and kissed her on the cheek. She looked at me funny though, but I didn't mind it. I was feeling great, a mix-up of affection for everybody in my field of vision and some tender erotic weakness in my legs.

The next day, I met my couple of friends at a bar opened on the Bologna's afternoon. After the whole night awake, sex with an unknown girl (not the one with the bottle), having strolled around Bologna hills and streets all morning, having checked out from the too much expensive hotel where I didn't even sleep, so much I was surprised to be well awake still, and with a strangely fast-beating heart, I finally learned it was MDMA I had liberally drunk from the bottle of water that night.

People is still having fun to this day from my reaction in that bar.
My, how many neurons I burned?! I cried. I won't be anymore the cleverest guy in the room! And all I've done tonight... that means nothing because it was all for the drugs, right?

But you had fun, said the rockstar.
I did. What a night!

The rockstar and my ex-girlfriend conceived a little girl that same night, who is today looking around the world with delicate beautiful eyes from her nervous still postion in the cradle, and I had my share of rockstarrish life. On the downside, yesterday I fell in the bathtub and hit my head badly, and my ass too, saw a white flash, and thought it was all the effect of that one-year-old drugged magical night which ruined my sense of balance for good. Damn those drugs.