possibility

Last Saturday I went to see some Beckett plays at the Irish Repertory Theatre with a few friends. We were tucked into our tiny seats, smashed up against each other, the tiny stage below us. Just before the first play began, we were plunged into a darkness so total and complete it felt safe to vanish into, and for a beautiful hour and a half it felt like I wasn’t even there, not a body anymore, just a pure witness. So nice to see human strangeness on a stage, the strangeness only making the human part of it realer. The stage has a beautiful way of inviting belief, if you can fall into it just right. It needs you to believe in it for it to work. And it’s such a lovely thing when finally, somehow, the miracle happens, and the stage becomes the reality, the whole world.

Afterward we got drinks at a place with $38 mozzarella sticks, which nobody bought, though I kept scanning the restaurant every time a waiter passed, hoping to glimpse them. How on earth can mozzarella sticks cost $38? I mean, what are they even made of? Didn’t matter, because I was with my friends, and we sipped our drinks and talked and laughed, and it felt good to be in the world again, to hug people, to delight in the company and conversation. To really be there in a way that felt indescribably happy.

The group split, and three of us carried on to an earlier dinner, which was fine, overpriced, but at least the room was dark and the chairs were comfortable. This is a thing I care about tremendously, I’ve realized, that the room be dark and the chairs comfortable. I’ve realized it’s more important to me than the actual food. That the restaurant be quiet too, at least enough to where it isn’t difficult to listen. That’s one of the great joys in life, I think, leaning over a table to better hear your friend when their voice drops to a whisper, to see their face glow in the candlelight.

We parted ways and it was early yet, so I walked a mile in the sleet to a movie theater, where I watched a terrible movie, just awful, made even more wretched because they showed a better movie in the background of a long scene. Why display, within your own bad movie, a great one, as if to remind you of how awful what you’re watching truly is? I don’t think it mattered much, it wasn’t a movie anybody actually cared about, much less the people who made it. I could be wrong though, maybe it was a thing spoken straight from the heart, true enough to the filmmakers, the actors, the writers. Sure, why not? I kept looking behind me at the two or three other people in the theater, like Can you believe this shit? They could, I guess, and I left the theater in a terrible huff. Tromping down the escalator, the whole bit. I can be a real grouch about things like that, especially after a handful of martinis.

I burst out of the theater, intent on getting home as quickly as possible, and stopped where I stood. While I was inside, the sleet had turned to snow, and now the whole city was covered. I took a brief subway ride, got off a couple of stops early so I could walk. There weren’t many people out, the city gone quiet, like it does on good moments. A little dark, intimate, the snow under streetlights soft as candlelight.

It’s been said before, maybe a million times, but the snow has a power to hush, even a city. A dog pattered by, leaving its tracks. A lone boy made a snowball, threw it at nothing. Snow alters things, blanks the world out. Snow allows for dreaming. Covered in snow, a city can be anything. And I felt that strange feeling—hope, maybe, or anticipation—that comes when a place can be dreamed over. Possibility, that’s what it is, no matter how it looks. Good things are possible, they really are.