I wasn’t in the best place when I arrived. The apprehension, or now I should say prophecy, almost kept me from coming at all. But then there was the walk to clear my head, and I landed where I was afraid to be. Fear is the best motivator: tempting, defiant. When I arrived, aggressively, and found some anyone that I recognized, it was an act of self-rebellion. “I won’t be alone, and here, I’ll prove it.” This is my first confession.

Is it too late to say I had a good time? The festival, I mean. I wandered in, or I told people I wandered in, in fact I couldn’t stop telling people. Really, I had decided last night to go and prove whatever I wanted to prove. Back then though, it was bright, without reality to prove against. But anyway.

The films were good. I want to write, “surprisingly good,” but that would be like saying “pretty good” or “mostly good.” They were good, and I was surprised. And next to me was my friend, and seven seats down was my friend, and nine seats down and one row forward was my friend. And afterwards my friend left because she knew herself, and my friend invited me to dinner because he had to, and my friend didn’t say much. And I turned down the invitation because I knew it was more polite to not be there than to be there. Dinner was supposed to be a cup of microwave mac n cheese (“Macaroni & Cheese Dinner, NO certified synthetic colors”), but there is a floor-to-ceiling mirror near my desk. If I had seen myself, feeling how I felt, eating mac n cheese from a cup, I would have cried piping hot microwave tears. So I decided not to eat.

That’s when the passion came, and I put on my coat and left. There was an afterparty at a restaurant downtown, and I told myself that even if I backed out, the town would be nice at night. Despite how wrong I was, about a lot, this at least was true. Other than the huge old painted man, who guards an alley dumpster and painted cow, I wasn’t unsettled by anything. When I left at the end of the night, I really wanted to walk. But I was offered a ride, and then the polite thing was to be there.

That first forced conversation calmed me, and for a few minutes I admit that I was calm. That was the last time that night I can say I was authentic, no certified synthetic colors. Even then I was looking at the door, over and over, and in the moment it was nervous excitement and in hindsight it was like waiting for an execution. My friend and his friends walked in. The second time I tried to get his attention, I succeeded, and then my friend and her friends and their friends walked in. Our meeting was warm, and pleasant, because it was like they didn’t know how I felt and they had no reason to know, and I don’t think they did know, and I really didn’t want them to know. And my confession isn’t to them, because I don’t think they did anything wrong and I don’t think they think I did anything wrong, but I do want to confess to the people who were also there at the time who didn’t know my friend or my friend or any of their friends’ friends and who were lurking around the back like I felt like I was doing because I want you to know that I was deeply, deeply afraid of you and I felt like if I stopped trying then you’d pull me to the back and I’d be lurking there too. If I looked like I was them, then I’m a liar, because I am you.

After the awards were handed out, my friend was talking in a circle with his friends. And my friend was in a circle with her friends. I was standing in between them, which was a metaphor. I told the second circle that, and without any hesitation one of them put his hand out and said his name, and then the other one did. It wasn’t too little too late, but it might have been too late. But when I needed to calm down, I thought about that.

My friend’s friends’ friend gave me her phone so that I could take a picture of them, all of them, everyone. And I thought about the photographer for Apollo 11. The first picture of earth, bubbling up from the black, it was his work. He is the one man, alive or dead, who isn’t in the photograph.