"Meet my friend," I said to Jay, putting my hands over Cynthia's ears. "She's blind." "Don't worry about her," I said to Darren. "She can't see anything." "Check this out," I said to Matt, waving a hand in front of Cynthia's face. "No reaction."

The poor girl did, however, show a reaction. She wrinkled her brow and chuckled quietly, as though it were all just some inside joke. Nowadays, thinking back on that drunken night, I partly believe the whole thing actually did start out as an inside joke — one I had with myself. I knew at the beginning of the night she wasn't really blind. The joke's failure to reach a punch line, though, caused me to forget its entire premise. Even today it seems crazy I didn't notice all the times she made eye contact with me.

Half an hour 'til midnight, Cynthia and I went outside to smoke a cigarette, gaggles of the sighted flanking us to either side. I continued to harp on her blindness, and she continued not to understand it. At one point, I took her hand by the wrist, ran her fingers down my face, and said, "This is what I look like." Her lack of comment could only, I thought, be a sign she found me hideous. We went back inside to wait for 2005.

The year began with a kiss between two people, one who supposedly could not see but actually could, one who supposedly could see but actually could not. They say love is blind. Back then I was too young to understand such a concept. People who truly know of love do not confuse fantasy with reality. These days I understand that some people, while growing up, never notice the temperature rising around themselves, their exoskeletons of juvenility and imprudence going red with the heat.

At the conclusion of our kiss, Cynthia pulled away from me and said, "You know I'm not blind, right?"

"What are you telling me?" Streamers landed on my shoulder. Conical hats bobbed near my head. Balloons floated by my feet. "You mean you can see?"

"Yuh-huh."

Rather than comprehend the situation, that I had been mistaken about her inability to see, I instead raised my arms to the ceiling, smiled in her direction, looked around the room, and screamed, "It's a New Year's Eve miracle!" I frantically told my friends Cynthia had been cured of her blindness. Their ecstatic response was less an indication of my persuasive abilities and more proof that they, like me, were more than half in the bag.

"Let's get out of here," Cynthia said. "Go back to my place."

Often I understand women as poorly as I understand myself. That was one of those times. Why would a woman in her right mind invite home a man who had spent most of the night mistakenly thinking her blind? Moreover, why would a man in his right mind go home with a woman he had spent most of the night mistakenly thinking blind? At her apartment, according to what little I recall, we got naked in her bed and made out until we passed out. I do not think we had sex. Condoms were not to be found in my pockets. I hope we didn't have sex.

The next morning, I woke with no idea of my whereabouts, the location of my clothes, or Cynthia's name. I could faintly see my H&M shirt crumpled on the floor. Check. I could get home from any part of New York simply by hailing a cab. Check. What about this girl's name? No fucking clue.

Contrary to popular belief, womanizers, drunks, and assholes, not unlike their fellow creatures of the sea floor, do have the capacity to experience pain. I honestly felt bad about not remembering her name. Right before I was to make a fool of myself by addressing her as "sugar," though, Cynthia got out of bed and put on a robe, saying she was going the bathroom. She left me alone. That was when a familiar face appeared at the door.

"Rick?"

My friend Rick, who would later tell our entire group I'd looked like "the Sultan of Twat," naked except for a sheet bunched at my privates, told me about how he had come home with one of Cynthia's roommates, thereby explaining his presence and also, more importantly, revealing the "blind" girl's name. I put on my clothes in a rush. Outside of Cynthia's bedroom, as I wandered through the apartment, as I passed by an open doorway, I heard yet another familiar voice say, "Hey, buddy." I looked into the dark room.

"Josh?"

That made three of us: Rick with Elizabeth, me with Cynthia, and Josh with Katherine. Our situation gave a new meaning to the term "clusterfuck." In a hurry, I gathered Rick and Josh into the hallway of the apartment and, in a whisper, told them we had to get out of there before the girls tried to make us breakfast. God forbid. The pot of water surrounding me — my current predicament as well as my overall life situation — was coming to a boil. We snuck out of the apartment.

On the cab ride across Manhattan, something registered inside me. This was the world I wanted to live in. I wanted to live somewhere I could mistake a girl for blind and wake up the next morning in a strange apartment with two of my best friends. I wanted to live somewhere I could ride home the next day through a city that offered the possibility for an infinite amount of similar predicaments. Maturity was not a requirement for living in New York. It was the result.

The trip took us half an hour. Around ten o'clock, Rick, Josh, and I, each of us weary from the old year, each of us sleepy with the new one, made it back to the apartment. There in New York, eight months before I returned to the city for good, we discovered that our friends had boiled Maury alive.

Photography by Lorenzo Dominguez.