All we ever really have are matches in the dark. Moments. A look in your partner’s eye that you catch over lunch. The smell of street tacos. Hearing your friends’ baby laugh. Reading a really good passage and having it stick for seven years. Here’s to your illuminations, and to mine.
If we’re at a party or we’re at a potluck or we’re at a reading and I mention Fortnite to you, know I’m just wanting that same release for you, know that I’m advocating for play. Sometimes a narrative is overrated; sometimes dancing in a virtual world in an Ariana Grande outfit is what we need.
But trying to reflect on the moment as it was happening, trying to write about how special Amsterdam felt to my union as I sat next to the city’s canals sipping an Americano and listening to ducks quack, it felt impossible. The joys were so evident and immediate—there, in the shade of a specific red lipstick or here, in the movement of a smoke cloud from someone’s lit cigarette— that I felt no real desire to document.
