I am due to get my period this week, so that probably explains some of it. A lot of it. But not all of it. This feeling is something else, an unhappy, impatient beast inside me, roaring and clawing, pacing the corners of its cage, wanting to spill out and cry and wail and hurt everyone around me, and I don’t understand it or know what to do with it.

The thought of going home and sitting in the empty house depresses me.

I sit down on a bench and wait to see if I will cry. I blink a bunch of times, to hurry the process along, but nothing. There’s still too much adrenaline coursing through me. Plus I left my jacket when I stormed out and now I’m cold and getting colder the more I think about it. I want to go back and get it. I’m worried they’ll leave the room and not pick my jacket up and I’ll have to call the bar and ask them to look through lost and found, and it will be a whole annoying thing. They’ve probably gone right back to singing and have forgotten I’ve even left.

Lauren and Jesse are probably hooking up right now. Probably on the stage as I suggested. Why did I give them permission? I practically spoke the situation into existence, I’ve pushed them together—I have no one to blame but myself.

The bench is close enough that they’ll be able to find me if they come looking. I need someone, anyone, to come and look for me. I’m getting colder and colder now, so I walk back to the karaoke bar, trying to decide on my approach. Options are: slink in the back of the room, grab my jacket, and rush out and hope they don’t notice, or throw open the door dramatically and storm back in and make another scene and have another speech ready to go and pretend it was my plan all along, then quickly grab the jacket as I leave.

I briefly fantasise about walking into the room with a cute guy and letting them think I’ve just met him, or, no, that we know each other from uni maybe, and I’m taking him back to the house to hook up—there’s a cute guy standing in the doorway of the 7-Eleven up ahead and he looks like he’s up for an adventure, he might agree to come with me for ten minutes—but then I realise that would be trying to play a fakehook-up scenario over the top of a fake-boyfriend scenario. How many layers of fake can you really have? I need to draw the line.

Stop making plans that hinge on people pretending to like you.