it doesn't feel like christmas.

It doesn’t feel like Christmas.

Sure, it’s been snowing outside for a few hours, and the same five Christmas songs have been playing on repeat on the radio for weeks now, and every single advert on the television for the past few months has been promoting Christmas shopping, but that doesn’t mean that it feels like Christmas.

Which is perhaps why she has come here, to this club in the centre of town. She is in search of a little Christmas spirit, something to fill her heart with, if not joy, then something other than the horrible, empty void that has sat in her chest for uncountable months. She doubts she will find it, but it is worth a try.

Flashing, multi-coloured lights and pounding music spill out onto the pavement as she approaches the front door. It makes her feel dizzy already, and she has not even entered yet. A wave of her ID, a deep breath, a steeled resolve, and she is through the doors and into the pulsing, flashing, thumping frenzy of the nightclub, stumbling through the packed crush of the dancefloor.

The music is eardrum-bursting. The lights are blinding. The air is so thick with the smell of sweat and cheap perfume that she can barely breathe. She is surrounded by people on all sides, hundreds and hundreds of writhing, flailing, popping, shimmying bodies bumping into and jostling her as though she is nothing but empty air, stretching out around her as far as the eye can see.

That’s all they feel like to her. Bodies. Not people; not fellow human beings; not people to talk to and connect and sympathise and identify with. Just an unfeeling mass of glittery clothes and gelled hair and shining, sweating skin, as far out of reach and alien as the constellations in the sky.

The very worst place to feel alone is in a crowd.  And she has never felt more alone.

This was a mistake.

It doesn’t feel like Christmas.

She has managed to fight her way to the bar. It is a little clearer here; a little easier to breathe. She orders something unfamiliar off the menu that she doubts the bartender even hears correctly over the thundering dance track. Standing by the bar next to her, a group of young women laugh and chatter and yell and lift half-empty tumblers of alcoholic drinks. One of them spontaneously bursts into an off-key rendition of a Christmas pop song, and her friends roar with laughter and yell at her to shut up. They are having a good time.

It doesn’t feel like Christmas.

The bartender comes back with her unidentified drink, which she sips slowly as she looks around the overcrowded nightclub. People dance. Couples wrap their arms tightly around each other, bodies moving in rhythmic harmony. Groups of friends try out various different dance moves, laughing and playfully mocking each other. Solitary people sway about the melee, eyes half-closed, lips pulled into hazy smiles, clearly several drinks in or else influenced by drugs. For a while, she tries to focus on each individual face, each individual person, but before long they all blur together and the crowd becomes one giant faceless mass once more. It is as though the people are all one entity, faceless and nameless and utterly apart from her.

She takes another sip of her drink. Her head spins; her sight blurs; her ears ache; she is struggling to draw breath. She thinks she might faint. The girls at the bar raise an ear-splitting cheer.

It doesn’t feel like Christmas.

The mass of unfeeling bodies whirls about her. The lights flash and strobe and pulse. The drink burns her throat. Her head pounds.

The girls chatter and laugh, carefree and happy, glasses and voices raised to the sky.

It doesn’t feel like Christmas.

It just doesn’t feel like Christmas.

She knocks back her drink in one go. And then she orders another. And when that one is gone, she orders another, and another, and another.

And another.

One drink in and the music no longer feels so loud and intrusive. Two drinks and the crowd looks less cold, less unfeeling, less intimidating; less othered and far away and unreachable.

After the third, she steps into the crowd and loses herself to the multitude. She tips her head back and lets the nightclub fill her senses; lets it drown out her sorrows and pains and griefs. She lets the music and the lights and the colours and the alcohol and the swirling bodies sweep her up and fill her senses and carry her away to a transcendent world, a world where all pain is lulled and inner peace lurks at the bottom of a bottle, where woes are drowned out by music and fear is burnt away by burning strobe lights; a world where nothing exists but your own overwhelmed senses blacking out all the dark corners of your consciousness. She finds herself smiling as she sways amongst the rippling hordes, feeling the touch of warm bodies bumping against her bare arms, enjoying the way that the crashing music and splashing lights and the cold burn of alcohol in her throat washes into her and fills at least part of the void. Perhaps this is not joy. Perhaps it is not peace. But it is something other than emptiness, and she will take it for now.

So she loses herself once more, until she is so lost that she has no way to find herself anymore, no way to know which way is up and which is down and how to find the surface and how to draw breath. But she does not want to surface. She likes it here in the deep dark ocean. She likes it here where her mind is too full of feeling to properly feel anymore. She likes it here in a place where nothing and no-one can ever find her; where she can’t even find herself.

It is safe here. And it is calm.

Though it still doesn’t feel like Christmas.