The Party

The party was on a Thursday, which Nour thought was a strange choice but didn't say.

Petra had booked the top floor of a bar that played music too loudly for real conversation but not loudly enough to excuse not having it. There were balloons. There were people Nour recognised from work and people she didn't recognise at all, and within ten minutes she had lost track of which group unsettled her more.

She got a drink. She found a corner that had a good view of the room without being in the middle of it. She smiled at the right intervals.

The man beside her — Marcus, she thought, from Finance — was explaining why he'd stopped watching the news. "It's all the same," he said. "Negativity. I just switched off and honestly? My life got so much better." The woman next to him nodded enthusiastically. Two more people joined the circle and the story was told again, slightly differently, with more conviction.

Nour knew eleven specific things about the psychology of news avoidance, the difference between informed detachment and wilful ignorance, and the documented link between low-information diets and poor civic participation. She knew all of this the way she knew most things — immediately, involuntarily, in layers.

She said: "Yeah, I get that."

She smiled.

At some point someone asked what she did and she gave the short version, the one she'd learned to give, the one that didn't invite the follow-up questions she couldn't answer without making people feel something she hadn't intended. "Marketing strategy," she said, and watched the person's eyes move past her toward something more interesting across the room.

The bathroom on the third floor was small and smelled like a candle that was trying too hard. Nour stood at the mirror for four minutes. She wasn't fixing her makeup. She was just standing there, in the quiet, with the music muffled below her and no one requiring anything from her, and she thought: this is the part of the party I'm actually enjoying.

She went back down. She stayed for another hour. She hugged Petra at the door and said it was wonderful and meant the hug, if not the word.

In the car, she sat for a moment before starting the engine.

She wasn't unhappy. That was the thing she could never explain. She wasn't unhappy, and she didn't dislike those people, and she understood that parties weren't supposed to be seminars. She just felt the distance, always. The glass between herself and the room. The sense of watching rather than being inside.

She'd felt it since she was nine years old.

She started the car. She drove home. She made tea and read for two hours and felt, genuinely, entirely herself.

The drive home always felt longer than the drive there.

Not because of traffic. Because going required performance and returning required nothing — just the seat, the dark, the radio she never turned on.

She thought about Petra, who had genuinely seemed to love every person in that room. Who had moved from group to group like someone who belonged everywhere. Who had laughed at things that weren't quite funny and somehow made them funny by laughing.

Nour did not envy this, exactly. She admired it the way you admire a talent you don't have and aren't sure you want — something that looks like ease but might just be a different relationship with depth.

She thought: I wonder if Petra goes home feeling full.

She thought: I wonder if I ever will.

Then she unlocked her front door, made the tea, opened the book, and let the thought go. This was the skill she'd spent years developing — not the ability to enjoy parties, but the ability to be genuinely okay without them.