I’ve personally never liked parties. The music, the happy people and the fun environment disgusted me. At this point, my brain is capable of making the perfect excuses for not being able to attend parties immediately on the spot of the invitation. However, when I received an invitation to this one party my company hosted for its clients, I knew that I had to go. A New Year Party in Limassol, Cyprus! I love traveling as much as I hate parties. Since this was an excuse to travel to one of the most beautiful places in Europe, I decided to give parties a second chance.
On 26th December my co-workers and I boarded a plane to Cyprus from Bahrain. I spent 4 days touring Larnaca, Limassol and Nicosia, and ate at a popular restaurant. My co-workers left me to visit a small numismatics museum. They brought me back a souvenir, a dupe of a beautiful gold coin minted in 325 BC in Salamis, Cyprus, from the gift shop. On the day of the party, unexpectedly, every single one of my co-workers came down with food poisoning, except me. I assumed this was enough to cancel the party, but apparently, we couldn’t let our clients down. The party happened, but I was the only employee from the Bahrain branch attending. I didn’t have anyone to interact with, so I just sat in a corner eating the delicious food laid out. Midnight was almost approaching and all I did the rest of the night was scroll through my Twitter timeline, until someone tapped me on the shoulder. “Want to dance?” a tall man with brown hair, around my age asked me. I wasn’t in the mood to dance at all, but unknowingly, my head started nodding in acceptance. Initially, I planned to dance for two songs and go back to my seat, but surprisingly, I found myself actually enjoying the party! The man was very fun to be around, he made hilarious jokes that kept me laughing throughout the party!
While dancing, I asked him to get my phone from my bag and pointed towards its direction. After fifteen minutes of him not coming back, I returned to my seat, I had my share of fun for the day and decided to rest till the party ended. I searched my bag for my phone, only to find out that the souvenir coin my friends had gotten me from the museum, was gone! Shame, as it was such a beautiful coin, and looked like an exact dupe of the original. Suddenly, we heard sirens go off outside the hotel. Police sirens. I found my co-workers from Bahrain in handcuffs, and the director of my company frantically explaining something to the police. I was confused and terrified as I saw one of my coworkers point to me. Turns out, my coworkers had stolen an ancient coin of the Salamis Island from the museum, and gave it to me as a “souvenir” to safeguard. I honestly didn’t know where the coin was, but I was sure that I’d kept it in my bag. To buy me some time, I told the police that I’d dropped it in the restaurant I was eating at earlier that day. After they left, I began thinking about how the coin left my bag, when it suddenly struck me. The man from the party. I showed him the way to my bag, and then, he never came back. Since I would be a main suspect after the police come back empty handed, I wanted to clear my name, so I decided to give the police pictures of the man from the party. I asked the photographer of the party to print out pictures she’d taken of the dance floor to give the police. But to my shock, while I was in every picture, there was no one next to me! The man I’d danced with for an hour, the only person who could acquit me from this case, wasn’t in a single picture. Terrified, I asked everyone in the party, if they remembered the man I was dancing with. And every single person I’d asked said, “I saw you dancing, but there was no one beside you. Some of us saw you loudly laugh and talk to yourself, but we just let you be because we thought you were drunk.”
Laugh and talk to myself? How did no one, not even the pictures, capture the man next to me? Then who took the coin? But most importantly, who was that man? Was he even human? I think it’s safe to say that I’ll never go to a party again.
