May the Odds (and the AMC Parking Situation) Be Ever in Your Favor

March twenty-fifth. I want it on the record that I stood outside the theater for two hours last night and I would do it again.

The Hunger Games midnight premiere. I went alone, which felt like a bold life choice when I was deciding and then immediately felt like a completely normal thing to do once I got there, because the line outside stretched most of the way down the block and everyone in it was either in a group of friends who had clearly coordinated their outfits, or alone and trying to look like they had somewhere to be on their phone. I was the second kind. I re-braided my hair three times. The first two attempts were bad. The third was only okay. I have the photo to prove this was happening in real time.

Checking the ticket. Again.

At some point in hour one I got tired of pretending I was casually browsing my phone and just started talking to the woman standing behind me, who was also alone and also redoing her ponytail, and we had a very good fifteen-minute conversation about whether the casting was right and then the line moved and we drifted apart and I never got her name. This felt very much like the correct amount of human connection for a midnight movie line.

The movie itself, I am not going to spoil anything, was good, and I cried a little in a part I did not expect, and I drove home at two-thirty in the morning with the windows cracked because the March air felt exactly right for that. I have been going to yoga on Wednesdays and writing letters and photographing flyers I haven't acted on yet, and none of that prepared me for how much I needed to sit in a dark room with three hundred strangers and watch something that actually meant something. I got home, put my shoes by the door, looked at the collapsed bowl on the windowsill and Gerald drooping slightly to the left, and thought: good night. Good night.

Made it inside. Barely keeping it together.