When Harry Met Sally Can Kiss My Ass
[Posterity Note: Written last night while merry. Somewhat embarrassing in the cold sobriety of morning. I admit I still stand by the sentiments, though perhaps not by the sentimentality.]
It’s been far too long, I know. Even as I write this I am painfully aware of the 5980 or so words of my dissertation I have yet to write, and the vast unexplored realm of legal knowledge that was meant to have been this year stretching out before me, but right now I’m probably too drunk to be able to do real work and therefore resort to writing this.
Why this drunkenness, you wonder, and what is she drunk on? I’m not particularly drunk on alcohol, I must clarify. Half a bottle of wine and two Smirnoff Ices do not a drunk Michelle make. I am drunk on the sheer bliss of the click, the connection, the comfortable conversation, the warmth of a glance, the joy of remembered and continuing fondness. I am drunk on laughter and the honeyed sound of a trumpet in a smoky pub. I am drunk on love, platonic but long-standing and equally intense as all the other kinds, just in all sorts of different ways.
There is no cure for the blues quite like a night out with people you love. Tonight was dinner with Nick, ostensibly to celebrate our recent birthdays, but really just the impetus we’d been needing for the longest time just to get together and revel in the glory that is us. The Social in Angel yielded some good wine, an extremely good steak for Nick, an interesting rabbit risotto dish for me, and talk, and talk, and talk, as good as it had ever been, as if a gap of months had never happened. Russ joined us later in The King’s Head, where the two boys enjoyed themselves shouting rather embarrassing and intrusive questions at me over rather good renditions of jazz standards.
To describe it more would make more, or less of it than it was. It was a night out with two of my best friends. It was a night that answered creeping and somewhat irrational fears of “Have we grown apart?” with a resounding NO. It was a night that reminded me, although I hadn’t forgotten, that you can love and be loved in all sorts of ways. I was blue earlier this week. I’m not any more. Other things contributed to this, but tonight was the turning point.