retrograde
We celebrated the last day of work with dinner and drinks. “I hope everyone is ready to get hammered!!!” I text the team that morning in a fit of excitement. I was soon to eat my words.
When the first bar closes, three of us decide to jet to town for round two. G, drunk but still able to walk, makes off with her glass of G&T. Down the escalators of Jewel, she looks up at the Apple Store and shrieks, “What is that?! Oh my god it’s so beautiful, it’s SO beautiful!” while knocking back more G&T. I prop her up from the side, the bottle of gin from dinner sloshing around in my bag.
One harrowing car ride later, we reach our destination. In my haste to find a bar that opens past midnight — what happened to these spots?! — I hadn’t realised I had taken us to a secret speakeasy. G and J scamper outside while I frantically figure out how to get in. A waiter pops outside to get the next group of people in. “Excuse me,” I ask, “do you have a table for three?” “Not now, but scan to make a reservation. We’ll call you when your table is ready.” He disappears behind a mirrored panel and instantly I go from step 1 to step 0: forget looking for the entrance, I first have to find a QR code to get a table.
I turn to the stranger next to me, who has been diligently using a playing card to trace the length of the wall.
“Are you trying to get a reservation too?” I ask.
“No, my friends are inside but I can’t figure out how to get in! They gave me this to use.”
I feel like I am in an absurdist film.
*
Outside, I find G smoking, and J trying to smoke. “You smoke?” I ask J, and she proudly tells me about the first time she “smoked tobacco” — just last week. After a single puff, she excitedly, repeatedly announces, “Now I have smoked tobacco twice!!!”
“Oh my god, nobody says that, please stop,” I reply. G, in the meantime, is almost to her knees trying to pick up her cigarette off the ground. “OK, that’s it, we’re getting food and coffee!” I declare, and the three of us haul ass to the only place I know still open at this time: Starbucks.
*
As a creature of habit, it’s not surprising that I’ve ended up here, a place I have lost many nights to. As I hold back G’s hair while she pukes, as I watch J zigzag up and down the pavement hysterically looking for her “lost” phone, as G falls asleep at the table and J slurs I missed my chance, it becomes really easy to take stock of the years. I have a fuzzy memory of a first date I had across from where we are — though I cannot remember who it was with now, only what I was wearing. On that bench G and I sat on? That’s where I had two big fights. This Starbucks used to be a restaurant styled as a diner; the nearest bathroom after dark here always has baby roaches; the bar on the corner that used to give me free drinks no longer exists.
This night was not what I had in mind, but it is perhaps the most fitting representation of — and end to — this part of my career. You make plans. You ditch plans. You didn’t ask for a lot of this, but life happened and you have to find a way forward. So you make do. You’re miserable, you’re alive, you’re thankful.
Change happens in the space between. I understand this as I sit under the night sky with the girls. And though I fear I will always be nostalgic for what was and could have been, this is where the years have brought me to now.
It isn’t so bad after all.
