Instead, picture this.

Instead, picture this.

It’s funny.

It’s never the things that I most look forward to that I want to write about, even those moments that fulfill and even exceed expectations, the ones you turn over and over again in your head, rough rock turning to skipping stones.

Instead, it’s those extraordinary moments that catch you by surprise, when you slurp air in real fast and you get hiccups that last longer than that singular, ordinary flash of magic.

Tonight, I could tell you about dancing in this dream-come-true-obsessive-list-making-tourist kind of way in THE honky-tonk bar of America, of Bourbon sweet tea, and a dancing teacher like a borderline-anorexic, older Kristen Chenoweth on the brink of a nervous breakdown, full of sexists chirps about how “you must dance with the lady to your chest to make it clear that only one person is making the decisions, and it’s not her.”

But I won’t.

Instead, picture this.

It is minutes before your new friend’s birthday.

It is now pouring with a fury reminiscent of a protest, you’re just not sure for what. 

It started off as heat lightning flashes on the drive home, but soon scattered into the real thing, thunder and all.

You wait to wish your friend happy birthday before you leave. You miss your bed, the inevitable conclusion of any excursion, big or small.

But the rain! And the thunder! And the lightning! So furious the world looks white and silver as if consumed and smudged by smoke and dust.

So you look for a trash bag in the dark pantry of a strange co-op, rumored to be filled with unfazed rats, with a strange hipster boy with a perennial smirk. (Strange, as most Austin hipsters you have encountered at parties such as this are sweetie pies!)

You finally find a sturdy, durable black garbage bag, and burst a hole for your head through it, pulling it over your coral lace vava-voom dress like a penguin’s best suit.

You clonk forward in your lovingly tattered boots, into the dark, silver night.

You are alone on the street.

Ordinarily, you wouldn’t do this. You acutely know the risks.

But it is raining! And empty! And you are free! And alone!

The city is flooding, and gushing, as if just for you, as if it trusts you to see it a bare mess, and stay anyway.

It is ripping at the seams. It cannot contain itself.

And it’s warm!

You cannot remember the last time you walked in a warm night storm.

Perhaps summer arts camp when you were 15?

It doesn’t matter.

Every summer night and dream is contained in the beautiful tearing apart of this day’s dryness.

You are in a trash bag, in a lace party dress, in well-walked boots.

You are alone, and you are glorious.