Small Talk

It’s your party and you’ll cry if you want to.

Parties are strange, otherworldly places. In a room filled with booze and strangers, emboldened by the paradoxical privacy afforded by chatter and thumping music, people transform. “Once, I went to this party,” artist and game designer Gabrielle Genevieve says. “There was this guy there who I’d never met before. He’s sitting next to me, and he just starts going off about his partner of seven years. He doesn’t know if he loves them any more – and they’re across the room, talking to somebody else, and he’s like, completely letting his whole soul out onto me. It was kind of intense, and I was like, ‘Oh, god’. He looked at me at the end and he said, ‘I can’t believe I told you all of that’. And I said, ‘No, it’s okay – sometimes you need to get it out’.”