My second nature

“Hi,” shouts an enthusiastic-looking girl over loud music at a party and passes on a friendly smile.

“Hello,” I reply with a hesitant smile, glance at her suspiciously and continue dancing, thinking to myself “Who is she? Do I know her?”

Then suddenly she’s right in front of me (someone is invading my personal space! Where’s the panic button?!), friendlier and with even a bigger smile on her face than before, saying again a big ‘hello!” and adds my name to it. How the hell does she know my name?!

I feel trapped, I can’t think on my (dancing) feet of an escape route, and so I just repeat a “hello” and try to look more relaxed, less suspicious of her, and pretend like I actually do know who this strange girl is.

It seems to work, because she asks how I’ve been. (But as I actually can’t really remember her) I find it hard getting into a chatty mood and reply maybe a bit too laconically: “Fine, and you?”

Oh, no! She’s cracked my pretense and starts querying: “Don’t you recognise me?”

“No!” slips an honest answer through my lips faster than expected but at least it feels like a relief… for as long as… not for very long really as after she’s introduced herself to me, her name doesn’t ring a bell and her explanation how I should have known her don’t provide enough evidence to be certain about her identity, but to avoid showing myself in the light of a person with a memory loss, I go along, play a part of being an old friend and luckily get away with it for the rest of the night.

I know it’s embarrassing but then again, I was in my late teens and had already suffered from a memory loss, so please do forgive me!

Unfortunately it hasn’t been the only time that I’ve had to use similar tactics, or let’s call these - pretense-skills. It happened during the first year when my best friend and I lived in London. We’d met a band that played good enough music and as a bonus all its members were friendly towards us and happy to have a conversation before going onto the stage. For us it was nice to have someone local to talk to as our other friends were yet to be made. 

Also thanks to the inside knowledge (thank you, world wide web!) of the locations and times of the gigs, we could just go and meet up with our new friends without making a fuss of setting up a date (read: not having to worry about being turned down). But after a few gigs we didn’t want to show that we were that keen (or clingy?), showing up at another performances of theirs, which obviously didn’t stop us going! 

So we entered the pub. Phew! There was a little entrance hall with windows where we could look into the pub and check how busy it was (and if the band was already there). We thought we were invisible (or like stood behind a tinted glass where you could stare, pull faces at the people on the other side, but they weren’t able to see you) and we pressed our faces hard onto the window. It was clear - the band stood at the bar. We opened the door, walked casually to the bar, pretending not to have seen them, kept a small distance and then (pretend)unexpectedly spotted them with a fake surprise - oh, look who’s here too! A few moments later when our gaze was turned towards these windows we’d looked through before, we realized how wrong we’d been about our invisibility. But naturally we played it cool and never mentioned it (trying very hard not to picture our faces pressed onto that window).

Me, the cool one, making Matt dizzy (drawn by Amelia)

And additionally on a similar note - playing it cool might soon become my second nature as (sorry for repeating myself to those who already know this) when we had our first date with Matt we talked for hours covering all sorts of topics. So when he asked: “Do you like to dance?” and I heard him saying “Do you like drugs?”, I smoothly moved onto the discussion about drugs. Don’t blame me, he was the one who brought that up!