One time this happened...

Sometimes I get the itch to paint the room a shade of chartreuse, not the walls, people - I'm thinking the entire party. A lone jazz clarinet floats through the air; I'm not sure who's blowing into it, but I think it's hypnotic.

Somehow I've made it out of my childhood, only to find myself trapped behind a crowded bar in my early twenties, desperately trying to recreate someone else's idea of a rite of passage. My friend Rachel hands me a neon-green beer koozie and I awkwardly place it around an almost-empty Pilsner.

The smell of sweat and stale beer clung to me like a bad tattoo as I stumbled out of the crowded bar, arm in arm with a guy who claimed to be a neurosurgeon but looked suspiciously like a middle-aged hipster named Dave. We had met exactly four minutes prior and were, somehow, in the midst of planning our first joint karaoke performance in Japanese.

The ice clinked against the side of the glass like a hesitant greeting as I rummaged through my coat pockets for the cash to pay for yet another overpriced beer. People laughed and shouted in the background, a disorienting maelstrom of sound I'd grown accustomed to at parties like this one.

Sporadic bursts of laughter punctuated the room's thick silence like fireworks in a thunderstorm. It was probably the third or fourth time I'd spilled my drink, but nobody seemed to care – mostly because they were too preoccupied with trying to get the DJ to play their favourite song.

The fog from my forgotten whiskey hangs over the dance floor like a bad smell. I weave past strangers' shoulders, eyes watering from the smoke and cheap cologne.