Are you on the guestlist?

It’s 2004, and I’m at Sonar Festival in Barcelona, sleeping in a hot dorm with six others, drinking cerveza limón, listening to music in cool (as in: not hot) dark churches and spending the nights in a massive aircraft hanger for more live music and DJs.

Sometimes, between Sonar by day and Sonar by night, the same festival divided into two parts, there are parties in town run by Vice. This is the hot ticket and half the people I’m with will get in, while the other half won’t. I manage to blag a guestlist.

This period in my life seems to be a lot about guestlists. I have a boyfriend who will always manage to get himself in. He’ll skip the queue, take a sly look at the names on the list and use one of them as his own. Sometimes, I’ll be left queueing on my own.

From the outside, it might look like I’m going to cool (as in ‘desirable’) parties but from the inside, it feels like there’s this constant underlying anxiety about where we’re going, what we’re doing, whether I’ll get in. I don’t relax for our three years together.

Sometimes, that boyfriend will go backstage to chat to the DJs, as they are his friends, and I’ll be left dancing on my own. Sometimes, I’ll find it in myself to battle my way backstage too. Sweet-talk the bouncer. Nights out require a lot of energy.

When we break up, I have a period of still caring about the parties and the nights and the guestlist and the festivals and then I just stop. I stop caring. Or pretending to care. I just want to be with nice people, laughing, having fun, together, not in a race.

However, there will still be events and parties that pop up, occasionally, that I want to be invited to. Sometimes I am invited, sometimes I’m not. Sometimes I’m invited and I don’t want to go. That can be awkward, especially if it’s a hot ticket event.

But then, I am a bit awkward, behind the mask.

When you’re not invited

When I lived in Frome, in Somerset, there was this woman who was known for her parties. Every year, there was this buzz in the air in the lead-up and people would quietly find out if they were invited or not. I was never invited. And I cared.

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