Soaked Through

Maike was opening up her new place in Kreuzberg and threw this sprawling housewarming that turned into the kind of night you only half-remember and feel weirdly grateful for anyway. The plan was simple: arrive, get wasted, see what happens. We knocked it out of the park.

The drinking had no coherence to it. Whatever was on hand went in—someone’s mystery bottle, someone else’s beer, just here, drink this and there’s more where that came from. Mixed with the right kind of chaos, it tastes like everything and nothing. I remember a blind cat at some point, someone’s mother praying in Italian in the corner, and this woman who introduced herself with a Swedish-sounding name and made everything she said sound like it belonged in a specific kind of film. We found ourselves screaming along to DJ Bobo’s Pray at one point, which remains one of the most shameful thirty seconds of my life and also genuinely one of the best. Orange shopping carts appeared at some moment in the night—I still don’t know where they came from—and we had strong opinions about pushing them around as though we’d solved a major engineering problem.

By the time things were winding down I couldn’t reconstruct the evening in any meaningful way. It was just a series of dumb decisions that felt inspired while we were making them.

Svenja and I split off when the conversation kept circling back to the phrase make-out party and we couldn’t stand it anymore. The rain was coming down hard. We were soaked by the time we got to the u-bahn, both of us dripping and useless. There was a guy behind us burping with this athletic commitment—like his body was genuinely trying to achieve something through burping alone. We didn’t care anymore. That’s how you know a night’s worked: you end up somewhere stupid and broken and you’re just fine with it.