You keep telling yourself that twenty-two is the time to make mistakes. You work really fucking hard just to stay alive and not cry in public. Be as wild as you want.
In truth, you don't know if you were ever really wild, or if you've fooled everyone because you do it a certain way: Take two shots of something that somebody else paid for. Slide your finger distractedly through your hair/up your leg/down your arm/across your throat. Make eyes at an undesignated, unimportant person across the room/train/bar/lawn/etc. Go home with someone you didn't look at all night.
Be up before eight am. Finger whatever piercing, tattoo, kiss, cut, or scar you've accumulated, stepping over a stranger's shavings to get to the bathroom sink.
Your choices will start to feel like the children of a husband's first wife. Your choices will feel as if a stranger inflicted them upon you - something to endure. And then, you'll grow to love them as if they were your own.
You'll love them so quickly, they'll turn into your best stories by the time the next night slams the door.
That time Dan and I got drunk on St. Mark's and let some guy named Tino give us piercings. That time Bailey dragged me up five flights of stairs to get a tattoo she drew on a scrap of paper torn from the Gay Times. That time you laughingly shared a water-pillow with a boy named Mike, because he lived in Georgia, but still knew how to spell Dostoevsky at three am, three whiskey sours in.
They're your best stories. But who were they about, again?
