He catches me by the arm near the bookshelf — the bookshelf, lads, that old wooden sentinel that stands guard over spines it never wrote, spines cracked open by hands long gone quiet — and before I can get a full sentence out, before I can even shape a proper hello, he’s already launched, mid-stream, mid-wound, and the words pour out with that practiced urgency of a man who’s told this story so many times he knows exactly where to drop the emphasis, where to let the voice crack just so, but never quite enough times to learn when to let the damn thing die.

     She this, she that, she used to laugh like, she always said never mind, she never understood the first thing about, and I nod because nodding costs nothing, because interrupting would mean spending something I don’t have tonight, and because the whiskey’s gone conversational now and loosens the muscles in my face until they arrange themselves into something that passes for empathy from three feet away. His voice carries that rehearsed tremor — half pain, half performance — like he’s still auditioning for the part of himself in a play that folded years back, marquee dark, tickets burned, but he keeps running lines in empty theatres anyway.

     His hands won’t stay still — they chop the air into neat paragraphs, circle like they’re trying to lasso the memory, grip an invisible steering wheel as if the whole sad narrative might skid off the road and crash if he lets go for even a second. I’m caught in the slipstream, pinned there, unable to pull away without committing the cardinal party sin of rudeness, which is worse than boredom, worse than an empty glass, worse than being caught staring at the wrong person across the room.

     “She said I was distant,” he says, and leans in until I can count the faint lines around his eyes, and he lowers his voice to a stage whisper, and I think — but don’t say — that distance is often just another name for silence that didn’t get translated before it hardened, before it turned into stone between two people who used to share breath. But he’s already racing ahead, laying out evidence like a prosecutor who’s forgotten the jury left the courtroom long ago: texts timestamped and underlined, dates circled in red ink, the exact inflection she used on that Tuesday in October when she looked at him differently, as if the entire relationship could be cracked open and fixed if he just arranges the clues in the right order, if he just repeats it one more time to one more stranger.

     Around us the room breathes on without mercy — laughter bursts like cheap fireworks then collapses into coughs, glasses clink in accidental toasts, someone dances badly on purpose because bad dancing is the only kind that still feels honest — but his voice slices through it all, a sustained solo, no chorus, no breaks, no room for reply, and I realise he isn’t really talking to me. He’s talking through me. I’m just the wall he needs tonight, the mirror that nods back, the surface to bounce the grief off so it doesn’t shatter inside his own chest.

     The drink in my hand grows lighter without my noticing — someone’s refilled it, generous or careless, who can tell — and the alcohol starts playing editor, trimming my reactions down to the bare essentials: nod, small tight smile, murmur aye at the right beat, a quiet jazz accompaniment to his endless monologue, a few soft brushes on the snare while he wails the saxophone. “She was my best friend,” he says — they all say that, every heartbroken man at every party since the invention of whiskey — and for half a second there’s a flicker, a brief crack in the polished delivery, something raw and unscripted that pushes through the rehearsed lines, and I feel it, the real hurt underneath the repetition, the way grief can get stuck on a loop and dress itself up as analysis, as investigation, as anything but surrender.

     But the moment passes like smoke. He keeps going. Details pile higher — holidays in places that now taste bitter, arguments that still echo in empty rooms, shared furniture that’s probably sitting in someone else’s flat now, holding someone else’s clothes — until the story feels heavier than the room can bear, heavier than the ceiling can hold up, and I feel myself drifting sideways, and my attention slips like wet soap. I notice the grain of the floorboards under my shoes, the way the music’s shifted tempo into something slower and sadder, the faint sweet stink of red wine drying on the wood, anything, anything at all to stay upright inside this verbal undertow that keeps pulling.

    I wonder how many parties he’s stood at like this, how many strangers have taken my place against this same bookshelf, how many times he’s mistaken a nodding head for connection, how many times he’s walked away thinking tonight someone finally understood. When he finally pauses — just to drag in a breath, just to wet his dry throat — I seize the tiny gap, slip in something neutral, kind, non-committal, the verbal equivalent of a pat on the shoulder, and he nods fiercely, almost gratefully, like I’ve just confirmed every word he’s been saying to himself in the mirror for months. Thanks me for listening as if I’ve done him a small, sacred service, then drifts off toward another knot of bodies, story already cued up again, index finger on the play button, scanning for fresh ears that haven’t heard it yet.

     I stand there a moment, suddenly alone in the noise that rushes back in like water through a broken dam, and my head rings not with what he said but with what he didn’t — the silence stitched between the sentences, the pauses he won’t let breathe, the way some people carry their past like a mixtape they refuse to overwrite, track after track of the same old ache on repeat.

     I take a long swallow. The whiskey nods its quiet approval, warm and forgiving. And I think, not unkindly, that this is how nights fill themselves up: one person empties their sorrow into the air, another quietly refills the glass, the room, the hours, until morning comes to mop it all away. Then the music swells into something brighter, someone bumps my shoulder with a laugh and an apology, and the party reclaims me, already moving on, already forgetting the man at the bookshelf and the story he’ll tell again tomorrow night, and the night after that, until the words wear smooth as river stones and mean almost nothing at all.