You’d Never Believe It (audio)

Saturday night. Earlier in the evening than you might expect. We enter the bar and it’s a fucking madhouse. People are jam packed wall to wall everywhere, laughing, eating, drinking, shouting over the electric hum of voices and cold clink of glasses and silverware. They say in sobriety it’s the little epiphanies that strike you out of nowhere that can be so beautiful, fortifying, fascinating. I would have to agree.

When I take the first sip of my crisp tonic and lime, I have this wild joy tear through me. The kind you might get if you were meeting a blind date for the first time and he turns out to be ferociously handsome and super sweet, too. Surprising and yet you kinda had been hoping for it, too, just with very low expectations. My sudden joy is mostly pure but it’s a smirk actually, also. It feels like the warm simmer of a delicious emerging power and also kind of smug. Forgive me, I’m new at this.

But anyway, I have this brand new very enchanting thought: I get to stay with myself all night. I feel no sense whatsoever of deprivation, loss, denial, or sadness. When I would get wrecked in times gone by, it was to not just escape myself but run full speed away from everything. Like I couldn’t bear the feel of my own skin against the vicious world. But on this bitter cold February night, while downing my boozeless drink, I realized I actually liked being with myself. I didn’t want to disengage from this version of me. I didn’t want to lose her ever again, in fact.

I’ve also heard it said that “One is too many and a thousand is never enough.” Yeah. I get that. But the wild bit – the thing I find so gorgeous it borders on hilarity – is that none is more than I ever, ever would have believed.