This is a story about obsessional thought. Papancha. Differentiated from skillful thinking, contemplation, or miscellaneous monkey mind by the presence of suffering.

Papancha sucks.

How my dharma teachers Josh and Craig have explained it: you get stuck like a scratched record on a series of painful thoughts. The shitty stories your mind tells. So you reach for something — suffering taking the form of confusion or search — a drink, a hug, or perhaps something non-tangible: a pleasurable thought. Someone you love. Then you remember they’re gone. And so the thoughts start again. The can’t-stop-won’t-stop brain.

Since it’s the time of year for parties, and I don’t have the dharma cred to finish an essay on mental objects, I’m cutting to this. Fiction.

xo

The party was held in a loft apartment in one of the newly-gentrified outlying neighborhoods, four stops in on the train. Orange walls, art books, a girl with bottle-red hair flicking through a playlist on her iPod, playing music. Six white kids in a circle, dancing to late eighties hiphop and rap. Fifty more around them, laughing and clapping, or nodding along, drinking shots of good vodka out of pink plastic cups. There was a table with dishes of candy and pretzels and napkins, and bottles of liquor, their lids on the floor. Four more—not kids, late twenties, graphic designers and ad writers and thirty-somethings dressed like teenagers with desk jobs in magazines—standing in the kitchen, going through the beer in the fridge. Five in a bedroom, off down the hall, boys and girls in grad school or playing in bands, still working in coffee shops, passing a joint around, thinking no one could smell them because they’d shut the door.

This was what worked for Michael—wanting to be around people, and being afraid. He scanned the little crowd for the one girl there he knew—Addy, in her bright pink headband, white earrings, and eyeliner again—and saw her in the kitchen, with production and layout. He shouldered over to hug her hello. But as he made his way through he spotted the couch—green, in an awful plaid—and thought of time in college when—said he hated himself, under his breath—spent a night in a house like this, cramped on a fold-out with cigarette stains, crying over Elliott. And the next day he was sure everyone must have heard him—the whole town—though he’d screamed into the couch cushions. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Addy kissed the side of his face. “Michael! Glad you could make it!” He squeezed his right hand into a fist—one, two, three—and the memory, for the moment, was gone. “Addy! You look great. Anything around here to drink?”

Micheal saw people who looked like people he knew—also the thing about moving to a new place, where you don’t have any friends—you think you spot old acquaintances wherever you are. The girl with the iPod looked like Amy, to him—poor Amy, killed in a car crash—who once told him his phone number played Yankee Doodle—448-6158—and that his hair made him look like a girl. Oh Amy. He tried to kiss her, with all his hopes in the world pinned on her copper-brown eyes, and she said he smelled like a goat. This memory flashed three times, the girl worse than the couch, and it took nine squeezings of his nails into his palm before it went away.

She was looking at him, putting the iPod to rest, and he looked at her feet. Purple stockings, red ankle boots. Probably thinking he was on uppers, or if she’d seen his arm jerking, the way he’d just squeezed his hand, maybe coming down off of something, the starts and the shakes. “You can’t stand here without dancing,” she said, smiling, coming toward him. This was awkward. “I’ve only been here ten minutes,” Michael said. “I’m not even drunk yet.” He was sure she was judging him—the way his shirt wasn’t tight, and his hair—dark brown, over his eyes—surely had dandruff, visibly so. “You want a tequila shot?” the Amy-girl said. “We were just doing them. I swear—” She looked at him for a second, then over his shoulder, then back around at her iPod, then Michael, picking up again. “—there’s cups around here. I know we have cups! What’s your name?”

She was so pretty she made Michael think of violent, inappropriate things. He was afraid he would grab her shirt where the collar came open, or spit in her face. “Michael,” he said, shifting his cup to his left hand, sticking his right out to shake. She bit her lip and ducked her head and shook his hand, and Michael thought Oh Christ, a handshake, that’s the dumbest thing I could do.

“Carla,” she said. “Addy’s new roommate.”

He wanted to kiss her. Those copper eyes again. Once in eighth grade he’d buttoned his shirt wrong, and walked around school all day that way, and everyone could see. Stupid Michael, his head somewhere else. There were black spiders crawling out of the trashcan, in the corner of his eye. No—no spiders. Carla was saying something. “Vodka and coke!” He drank until he could dance with her, and Addy came over with her boyfriend, and the room filled with the thick sweet odor of smoke. And everyone, designers and copy editors and kids—not kids, Micheal thought—we’re all adults now—in school for social work, or library science—had their party and drank, not seeing the spiders, and had a good time.