A Very Specific Sunday-Night Decision

February twentieth. The thing about deciding to go to a midnight premiere on a Sunday is that you make the decision sometime on Friday, feel good about it on Saturday, and then arrive at eleven-fifteen on Sunday night standing in a line on a cold sidewalk wondering what, exactly, you were thinking.

I went to see The Batman. Solo. Which is a sentence I would not have predicted writing in this particular week, given that I have spent the last month thinking about pasta and boxes and objects and what it means to hold something without placing it. But there's a version of being alive that involves buying a ticket to a midnight screening on impulse and then showing up, coat and scarf and all, because you said you would. The line was long. My breath made small clouds. The person next to me had seen the trailer seventeen times. I found all of this completely reasonable.

The film is nearly three hours, which I did not adequately factor in. I got home at approximately three in the morning, stood in the kitchen for a moment in the dark, coat still on, Gerald visible in his pot, the windowsill arrangement doing its quiet windowsill thing, and thought: that was exactly the right call.

Stepping in from the cold, still not sure this is real life

I don't have a larger point. The box is still on the counter. The object is still unnamed on the page. The pasta machine is back in the cabinet. And somewhere between all of that, I stood outside in the February cold for forty minutes for a movie, and it was perfect, and that's the whole post.

The face of someone who made a very specific Sunday-night life choice