had we but world enough

Winter's settling in and it's making me think of that time I took a bus out to New York one January because some band I liked was playing there and I had a friend or two who were also going to be visiting that weekend for some other thing so I figured, hey, might as well make a weekend of it. It was fucking cold out.

I used to just let my feet and my inability to say "no" to anything carry me wherever the night willed, so that night I ended up at some diner with a woman I think one of my friends might have known, because I needed to catch the bus home in a few hours and it was late and I didn't have a place to crash anyway. We drank coffee, we ate disappointing pancakes, and we just fucking talked for hours like we knew each other. Like her presence didn't slowly exhaust me. (Do you have any idea how rare that is?)

Anyway, it was maybe an hour before I needed to catch that bus and I was worried maybe the waitstaff was tired of listening to us so I said I should probably head off. It was probably thirty minutes of walking in the cold to the bus stop (much less by subway but I was young and needed to kill time, what did I care?) so I figured this was the end, but no. She walked with me. We were shivering by the time we got to Penn Station and she sat with me until the bus finally let me on board. We hugged goodbye, did the whole promise to stay in touch thing, and I rode the night bus home deliriously happy.

Sometimes we interact on social media now, but not often. (I think she, like most people, thinks I'm a little much.) I was afraid, I think, that anything else would ruin the magic. That there was something perfect about that night, but that that perfection was something singular: that it could never happen again, that it should always just remain as a perfect memory.