The good ones have left. What's left is maybe eleven people in a kitchen, a bowl of chips gone soft in the humidity of everyone's breathing, and somebody's phone propped against a wine bottle playing a song three of them are slurring along to. A guy I don't know is asleep sitting up on the counter. Two women are having the most important conversation of their lives against the refrigerator, foreheads almost touching, and neither will remember it.
I used to be the first one out the door at these. Coat, keys, gone by midnight. Sleep is a schedule.
Now I stand in the doorway longer than I should.
Here is a fact people don't hold onto: the air you're breathing at this party, the whole breathable shell of it, is proportionally thinner around the planet than the skin on an apple. That's it. That's the entire margin. Below it, a warm kitchen at three in the morning. Above it, nothing, for a very long way, in every direction I looked.
And inside that skin, tonight, a fraction of a fraction of the roughly eight billion of us happened to end up in this specific overheated room, still awake, still choosing each other's company over the more sensible option of going home.
Someone laughs too loud and the sleeping guy doesn't stir.
I keep my coat on. I stay anyway. From up there you cannot see a single border, and you cannot see a party either, which is exactly why I can't bring myself to leave one early anymore.