A night in the suck city

[Fic.]

Guys and girls. Girls kissing guys, guys kissing guys, girls kissing girls. Swirly, colorful light patterns, blinking, blinking, blinking. Loud music, techno, blaring through the loudspeakers that seem so far away, thumping, thumping thumping. I'm not drunk I need to drive back my head hurts but I feel drunk. This is Kathmandu. This is Kathmandu?

For far too long I had avoided this. Pretended -- no, knew-- I was better, that the city didn't know how to party. I've done multi-day ragers in New York and San Fran, I said, I can teach the hippest kids in Kathmandu a thing or two. Real music festivals with real musicians who I heard before anyone even heard their names, before they conquered the world. In sticky, dingy basements, in deep comfy couches, among cool red trees. I'd seen the world, Kathmandu had nothing to show.

A close friend was getting married. To a doctor who he had been talking to on and off for four years. They met up somewhere nice for two weeks, twice a year, maybe thrice. Bali. London. Abu Dhabi. Rio. He was seeing other people, on and off, once a while. So was she. He didn't ask, she didn't ask. And now they were getting married. Everyone else was a hanky, they were each other's comfy T-shirts, permanent hanky-pankies.

Her friends were single ready to mingle smart doctors out for the last hurrah. The pressure was on for them just as it was for me, except it was quite serious and they had no physical escape away like I had. Maybe that's what they wanted forever but in their terms perhaps and not at this particular moment in time but it was not on them to make that choice was it. What was there for them to make a choice on was me. Us, rather. Nobodies who would go back to whatever foresaken sad-sack lives we'd come from struggling with our nine-to-five completely indebted lives who they'd never have to see again. That's what they thought anyway. They were doing us favors perhaps they'd earn good karma for whoever was to come next, we were good guys, our friend was a diamond and we were his best friends they could be themselves around us.

I want to say nothing happened it was all rather tame and we danced to hindi songs and got a little drunk and messed about went back to the hotel rooms we had rented for those three nights went out about town ate drank and had fun generally and everything was back to normal and those wonderful women went back into their lives serving as successful happy doctors married equally smart and successful doctors while we came back with sweet memories of cool girls who we messed around a bit with but there wasn't much in there and besides such occasions are not to be paid too much attention to because when people are afraid of getting old and being forced to marry they let themselves loose and let things happen particularly around people they trust because what do they have to lose anyway and you can trust these good people. That would have been a good ending to a fun story. A proper Penthouse-style story of repressed energies coming out interacting and intermingling with each other, sparking and sparkling burning everything in their paths and illuminating the night skies as they went away. Consenting adults interacting with each other. Everyone would have gone their own way, and two weeks on, life back to the old rut.

It was not to be.

Oh and the wedding, right. I guess I should explain the drama that happened before the wedding and how it got almost cancelled first, and then cancelled again because the bride and the groom and their closest friends were missing, but things got sorted out in the end. People barely noticed anything out of the place in the four goddamn ceremonies we went to. Just a bunch of young people doing young people things.