Ticket for One, Which Turned Out to Be Enough

I bought the ticket on a Thursday, somewhere between closing a browser tab and reheating dinner. There was a listing for a small evening event at the community center, a storytelling and spoken word night, the kind of thing the fall brochure buries in the middle pages, and I read the description twice, thought 'probably not,' and then registered anyway. That was eight days ago. Tonight I actually went.

I got there early enough that most of the folding chairs were still empty. Picked up a program from the side table, the mason jar of wildflowers was doing more work than it knew, burnt orange and yellow against the plain white wall, and chose a seat somewhere in the middle, which felt like the honest choice. Not hiding in the back, not committing to the front. I sat there in the quiet before it filled in around me and thought: this is the part where it's still possible to leave. I didn't leave.

Before it started.

The performances were good. A few were genuinely surprising in the way that makes you sit up slightly without realizing it. At one point a woman read something that rhymed with a specific early-morning feeling I'd been trying to name for months, and I wrote two words on the back of the program so I wouldn't lose the thread. I'll probably look at those words tomorrow and not be able to reconstruct what I meant. That's fine.

I walked home after, the long way, and the block with the dry cleaner's window had its lights off but the sign still lit. The prints are still leaning against the kitchen wall. The cord was casting its October shadow when I came in. Some nights you go somewhere alone and it confirms something, not loudly, just in the way the evening holds. Tonight was that kind of night.

Picked up the program. That counted as committing.