An exploration of nights out by Lois Olivia.

You choose a CD – Amy Winehouse, traditionally – and you get ready in your bathroom,  stopping intermittently to drink more of your sub-fiver bottle of white wine and grimace. You decorate your bedroom floor with jeans that don’t fit perfectly and tops that are too modest for tonight. 

And you wonder whether you’ll go all night wearing those knee-high heeled boots, or if the pain will spoil your fun. You know you’d hate yourself for that.

You’re late, because why break the habit of a lifetime? So you stomach the last of the wine, decide on a skirt that fits right and an immodest top, and zip up the knee-high heeled boots. You pack your bag: lip liner, Lambrini, the book you think your friend ought to read. You text ‘On me way’ and hope they read it in the Northern accent it was intended. You walk the familiar journey to their flat,

and you wonder whether you’ll go all night wearing the knee-high heeled boots.

You arrive and the greetings are excited professions of just how good everyone looks. They’re filming ‘Who is the most…’ TikTok’s, so you perch on the end of the bed and are told to drink for ‘confidence’, and for being most likely to ‘punch a man in the face’, and ‘have children first’. You wonder what this says about you. You laugh and hug, and talk of love and romance and Karen Millen charity shop finds, and the diversity and uniqueness of the vulva,

and you wonder whether you’ll go all night wearing the knee-high heeled boots.

You’re late, because why break the habit of a lifetime? So you stomach the last of the Lambrini and walk bare-legged and jacket-less (you’re proving a point) to the club. You hear ‘Valerie’ as you come down the club stairs and exchange looks, before quickly finding a pocket of space where you can dance – sensual slides down the wall, and all. You drink jager bombs like they’re going out of fashion and worry about paying each other back later,

and you wonder whether you’ll go all night wearing knee-high heeled boots.

You feel the comfort that is reserved strictly for a group of women in the company of each other. You’re eased in a way that reduces anything outside of the beautiful souls you’re surrounded by to mere background noise. You’re softened and natural and confident and you aren’t even fully appreciative of just how incredible you feel because it would be a cruel and unfair thing to remove yourself, even for a second, to make note of it,

and you wonder whether you’ll go all night wearing knee-high heeled boots.

But then you’re rubbing your friend’s shoulder on a bench outside and encouraging her softly to explain what happened, and your validating every single breath she takes for the avoidance of doubt, and you’re affirming that it has absolutely fucking nothing to do with what she is wearing, and you’re wandering around in the cold waiting to see him leave, and when he doesn’t, you find yourself approaching a bouncer and asking if there are cameras, and you’re having a conversation with the manager of the club and you’re explaining passionately, but calmly, so as to be taken seriously, that the suggestion of the police is perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately unhelpful and ridiculous, and you walk home hardened and furious and upset, and you’re sat on the couch doing everything you have in your power as a friend to make a situation so far outside of your power any better, and you’re sharing candid and sensitive and uncomfortable stories and bonding over the violence and disrespect and hurt and anguish and crimes suffered at the hands of men,

and you went all night wearing knee-high heeled boots and the pain did not spoil your fun, and then you think briefly that perhaps if you had been as concerned with men as you were with the knee-high heeled boots the night could have ended the way it began, with the innocent talk of love, and romance, and Karen Millen charity shop finds, and the diversity and uniqueness of the vulva, and you’ll yearn hopelessly for this alternate reality, and wonder if maybe it could have been different. But that would be wrong to think,

and for that, you’d hate yourself.