The Millennial Exit | The New Yorker

It occurs one evening. Earlier than you imagined it could.

To your shock, the lounge is stuffed with a palpable, serendipitous vitality. The sort that makes you are feeling glad you determined to placed on pants and go away the home this night. A outstanding, slutty effervescence you haven’t felt in a while.

You graze shoulders with a person in your solution to the bar. “Traditional transfer,” you say to your self. You’ll play alongside, smiling, whereas feigning confusion. You don’t know something—you’re virtually a foal!

However, as you look over your shoulder, you discover that the person’s gaze barely finds you. It’s as in the event you’re one thing unrecognizable now. A human-floater within the eye. You watch the person flip and proceed by the gang.

One thing about this change haunts you. You shudder, as in the event you’ve had a premonition. You inform your self it’s nothing, and proceed to the bar.

“Martini, please—with a twist!” you chirp grotesquely to a bartender. He appears to be like at you with disdain. Sure, you heard it, too. Like a practice derailing off icy tracks. Like a piglet being kicked. “Who was that?” you say to your self. You place a hand over your mouth, fearing {that a} swarm of bees may flood out of it.

It’s at this second {that a} good-looking, older gentleman makes his means towards you. He wears a tuxedo and approaches you instantly, intently. You shortly run the numbers on the oldest aged particular person you’d sleep with—then increase it by ten.

“Good night, madam,” the person says. “Would you kindly observe me?”

You smile and seek for one thing witty to say, assuming that his intentions are to escort you to some excessive rollers’ desk the place good-natured bets have been positioned on whether or not you’re Anne Hathaway’s cousin. However the man is already strolling away. He turns again, with a glance of slight impatience. Feeling each pleasure and dread, you pull your denims up over your beignet of lower-belly fats, and observe him out of the room.

“Is there one other a part of the bar I don’t learn about—a V.I.P. part?” you ask, listening to your sadly engrained millennial thirst for hierarchy and ostracism.

“Oh, sure,” he replies. “Your get together is correct this manner.”

The person leads you to an unmarked metallic door. On the opposite facet of it, you discover that you’re again contained in the lounge, solely now a thick pane of glass separates you from the gang you simply left. This room is carpeted and miserable. A handful of individuals, all of your age or older, lie round on couches. One man has taken his sneakers off. A lone bartender stands within the nook, slurping a cup of soup.

“I feel I’d like to return to the opposite facet,” you say.

“There isn’t a going again,” the person replies. “In the event you’d like to remain on the get together, you’ll have to observe from right here.”

A Martini olive falls from the mouth of a sleeping lady and rolls throughout the ground.

“However, I don’t perceive . . .” you say, teetering into delicate panic.

“You’re an exiting millennial. That is how will probably be in all places now. The earlier you come to just accept this, the higher,” he explains, mirthlessly, as if reciting the advantageous print on a disclaimer you’ve ignored for years.

Seeing the shock in your face, he provides, “Truths come violently now, or by no means.”

“Then I’d like to decide on by no means,” you say.

However the man simply shakes his head and opens a door to the dumpsters out again.

“All proper, then,” you mutter to your self, lifting your chin like an individual selecting to step into maturity with dignity, for as soon as. However you progress across the lounge erratically, knocking into folks’s drinks, sweating.

You duck behind a ficus to gather your self. You’re feeling uncooked. You go searching for somebody who can prevent—somebody from the Reagan period.

“However we had a stock-market crash and a plague! 9/11 and tanning beds! We had been raised on red-40 cereals and people-pleasing! Shouldn’t any of that depend for one thing?!” You’re screaming now.

The person finds you out again, cowering behind the dumpsters. You lookup at him, your doe eyes changed by unhappy, oniony bulbs.

“The place are we alleged to go now?” you ask, drenched in self-pity.

The person thinks about it. “Espresso outlets?” he suggests. “Well being-food shops? Auto garages?”

“However nobody has intercourse in these locations,” you say.

The person nods, confirming that that is true. You search his face, determined for some distant trace of compassion.

“All proper,” you say, wiping tear-damp hair out of your face. “I didn’t actually wish to come tonight anyway.”

“That’s the spirit,” he says.

Simply then, a Demise Cab for Cutie tune begins to play faintly within the distance. And it feels as if one thing that’s been clutching you releases its frightened grip.

You look again on the lounge one final time, and notice that you simply’re going to be O.Ok. As a result of the place you’re headed has gentle sheets. And fleece pants. And glorious espresso. ♦