Exactly When You Need Them
It was maybe midnight and we were the kind of tired where
everything is just funny, even when
it has no right to be. It had been a long day, at the tail end of an even
longer week, and we were the kind of tired and worn out where your brain just
starts to feel a little looser—a little sillier.
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| Friends and Food and Flags |
snow that caught on the tips of my eyelashes whenever I dared to walk outside. It was late and it was dark, and we were in the kind of small town that understands the concept of streetlights, but comes up a little shy in the execution.
The thing about going to school in a tiny town in the middle
of nowhere is that you have to make your own fun. There aren’t places to go, or
events to be at, so you get really good at being more then content with a few
friends and a room where you can all just be together. There was one bar in
town, but only kind of—in my two years there it had 3 different names, and
twice as many owners, and probably about a half dozen health code violations.
There were dorms and town houses, and--if you were lucky-- houses on the edge
of campus that your friends had managed to get permission to live in where you
could come hang out on a Friday night.
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| Sometimes weird objects show up, and sometimes I stick those objects on my face and take pictures. |
Then there was the co-op. It was a vegetarian cooking co-op,
and for most of sophomore year it
became my home away from home, even though I
was never technically a member. There were murals on the walls and good food
cooked by people I liked, and a mountain of pots and pans I could scrub and
clean the corners of whenever I felt the need to put a little strength and
aggression in to something. People had shifts cooking meals and cleaning, and
everything was shared. There was the kitchen, of course, but also a big dining
room with long wooden tables and big windows and decorations that had clearly
been cobbled together with a little luck and a lot of love. I loved it there.
So we were in the co-op and it was late, but not late enough
that people were rolling in to make late night drunken munchies. I was with a handful
of friends and we were yelling about something, or nothing, or everything, and
watching the snow fall through the big windows. We drank tea and ate cookies
and watched, for seemingly forever, at a loading screen on my laptop.
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| A mountain of scones and my favorite cook |
Someone had had the idea earlier that day that it would be
fun to play a video game using a projector on one of the walls in the art
building down the hill. Make the game 30 feet high and 40 feet wide, and
immerse ourselves in something fun.
I’m not sure if it was technically
allowed, but we had a key and we weren’t going to wreck anything or make a
mess.
But before we could even get to any of the
not-really-breaking-and-entering-because-it’s-sort-of-allowed-in-a-weird-way
nonsense, we had to figure out how to download the game.
See, the internet on campus was never great, and that night
it was being particularly awful. The download started at maybe 10 pm, and by
10:30 we were a little annoyed. By 11:00 that annoyance was starting to grow.
By 11:30 we were the kind of frustrated that seems almost delicate—like anything
could set it off. By midnight we’d somehow passed the stage of frustration and
started to realize how ridiculous the
entire situation was.
It was late. It was late and we were tired, and my computer
wasn’t doing the one thing we really
wanted it to do.
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| a person i enjoy and a mural that makes me smile |
So someone turned on the music. Because there is no better release
for all those mixed up feelings then dancing like an idiot with people you
love, when all of your emotions are frazzled and your brain just feels sore.
There is nothing like singing—or really shouting—lyrics to songs you adore late
at night and not caring who hears the cracks in your voice and your utter lack
of pitch. It’s freeing and it;s fun, and I think it’s impossible to not at
least crack a smile when you see someone start to disco to punk rock songs.
So we danced. We danced and we laughed, and ignored my
laptop as it attempted to chug along.
I think about that night a lot. How we didn’t really do anything, and how much fun it was.
How much I love those people. How much I love that place.
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| dancing and singing because sometimes you need to dance and sing. |
There’s a comfort in knowing that moments like that are
possible. Moments of pure joy and silliness. Moments of smiles and laughter and
ridiculous, summoned—as if by magic—exactly when you need them.
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