I remember despising myself that afternoon, when we shared five seats between the eight of us and borrowed collective nostalgia off one another. Not as a feeble attempt to cling onto the recklessness of our youth whilst life bared it's ugly teeth to us one by one, but rather an instinctive need to remember who we once were. The naivety of our shared memories held us as willing captives on those bar stools, pulling us so tightly that our knees touched and we did not notice the absence of seats.

I don't want to be able to explain to you why I cannot remember the things I still laugh about with you all. I am engulfed not by your desire to relive these moments, but somber acceptance that you will never feel quite so alive again. In these moments I find myself able to replace my absence of memory with the image of you lost in delirium of somebody else's reminiscence triggering a drunken mistake you thought missing a long time ago. I follow the movement of your eyes from person to person. How I would **** to be your gaze: omniscient of the past and omnipotent of the table.

I am selfish, I think. Sometimes I wish somebody had ever so gently knocked on my skull and whispered: "wake up, you're going to want to see this." But they didn't, and I hold nothing against it aside from the infrequent desire to have really been seen, and not just accounted for.

I wish I was party to your secret history that will only leave our table of eight when relayed as gin-fuelled anecdotes at parties we are no longer too yong to be expected to attend. And you think I was there, I suppose I was. You see no difference between me and your left and right. I live on intrinsically as an accessory to your glory years, but I relish in the hope that mine are yet to begin.

I have no memory of brushing my hair past my ribs, but I catch a glimpse of the person you saw me to be whenever your phone screen lights up. I will always be able to picture seven heads of hair and the crooks of your neck, even though these days you can’t straighten it without a click or two pink tablets on an empty stomach.

I am selfish, I know. I could relay the dilation of seven pairs of pupils when we all first got high together, but I couldn’t tell you what part of me went numb, even though I know you couldn’t feel your left big toe for three whole hours.

But for now we will sit, and I won't immerse myself in my routine of self-deprecation until I am sure that I remember the seven meals that surrounded me tonight. For now we will smile and share this table that could never be too small, and you will unwittingly drown me in a life I could only be living here, now, and every Christmas to come of which I am party to the past, even though I was never really there at all.