This weekend, if I was a writer.
I leave an hour late and it's dark, so I leave the light on so nobody will rob the house while it's empty. I get lost leaving Greenville because I'm a great driver but a terrible navigator and always think I know where I'm going, but rarely do. I check into a hotel by myself for the first time and for the first time I feel as if I am grown up, a real grown-up, as if I have a job and wear high heels and am having an affair with an executive at an enemy company. My friend arrives with a friend in tow, a blonde who I would under any other circumstances be intimidated by but a couple glasses of red wine in heavy hotel glasses fixes that. We call a taxi company called Charlenes Safe Ride and think we're going to be taken care of by someone's big black mama, but that ends up not being the case at all. Together, the three of us discover Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a town that compares itself to Athens, but could any town really be? We descend old stone steps into a bar called the Cellar and immediately I feel alive and beautiful because a tall man with a soul patch and glasses is smiling at me and I am saying witty and smart things and just as I am trying to buy him a drink he politely excuses himself and tells me it was nice to meet me, which I believe, and I'm not disappointed because he was named Cameron and was slightly cocky and too skinny to really be good in bed with a girl like me. I drink two glasses of Belgian beer and we find some Christian propaganda pamphlets and make fun of God-fearing Americans. The blonde and I assign nicknames for each other and I am glad because nicknames make me feel accepted and loved. We go to the concert we came to see and I realize I have left my ticket at the hotel. We get in anyway, buy a wheat beer each, and stand directly in front of the stage. We take over a hundred pictures during the show, pictures of the bands, of each other, of ourselves, always managing to catch someone else in the background, someone never intending to be photographed, someone who would be embarassed to see a picture of themself with that expression on their face. We drink so much wheat beer that they run out and we switch to Jamaican beer, take more pictures, flirt with boys, and by the time we leave it is raining and it is time to be picked up by Charlene's Safe Ride again. Charlene is late and we are wet and very drunk and we curse Charlene for 30 minutes until the driver arrives, a driver that would get lost and be creepy and take us to McDonalds and tell us to email him the pictures. My friend has fallen asleep in the backseat of the cab and first we take funny pictures of her but then we are worried we'll have to carry her inside. She wakes up and stumbles into the hotel past a cop, who she ignores to tell us her pants are wet. We stay up for another hour, talking about things we wouldn't remember the next day, fall asleep with our makeup on, and wake up with headaches and fuzzy teeth. I get lost again on the way home. I must learn to not be so confident about where I'm going.