It is a Friday afternoon in February, and I am so sad I could scream and I want, more than anything, in this very moment, to eat ice cream in the bathtub. Precisely, to take a bath while also eating ice cream. It sounds so decadent, so outlandishly rich and silly, and I want that for myself! I know that the logistics of this are terrible and so I will not actually eat ice cream in the bath. But just know that deep in my heart, I want nothing more than to eat ice cream in the bathtub and to make an absolute mess of myself.
I am thinking about joy and what it means to be a wild creature.
Four years ago, my best friend and I took a road trip to Lincoln, Nebraska — we traveled 900 miles to see two of our favorite magical and musical women, but more than that, the trip was about doing something only for ourselves, something to make our inner children vibrate from sheer ecstatic joy.
On a record-cold Saturday in Nebraska, we went to the movies, taking something from our ordinary lives into this suspended-in-time weekend and making it new and exciting and wonderful. It was not a short film, and our parking space — at least six blocks away from the cinema — expired more than thirty minutes before the movie itself even ended. “We are so fucking screwed if we get towed,” I say. “We’re not going to get towed,” she says to me. “Everything is going to be fine. We have the power of the Universe on our side.”
Sam has a way of calming the nervous rabbit of my heart that even my own mother could never quite manage.
As soon as the credits rolled, we grabbed hands and ran like two effervescent bats out of Hell from the theater, down the hall to crash through the doors and out onto the street where we ran, hand in sweaty hand, the full six blocks to my car, where upon arrival we fell to the ground laughing.
We have always been wolves together, even before we learned to love our fur and our teeth, before we learned it was alright to howl. I am not sure if this is how every pair of true best friends feels, and we have not actually stumbled upon some ancient power of divine friendship that few have ever experienced before, but it feels that way. It feels as if we are creating the whole world together.
We often joke that we fought through a war together, that we were in the fucking trenches, side-by-side, that we’re brothers-in-arms — but it’s not a joke, not really. When you are two strange young women who want only to exist as they are, the whole world is against you.
We won, though! We kicked the bastards right off our land and threw a big beautiful party in our big beautiful castle, and at night we take off all our big beautiful clothes and run on all fours through the big beautiful woods and howl with our big beautiful voices at the big beautiful moon.
