five hypothetical formative experiences that might transpire in the very near future

1) something will happen to you tonight, some inner valve will click on, and you’ll begin to live up to that of yourself you’ve enshrined in your mind’s eye when you’ve put the impulse towards self-pity to bed and begin to get that wistful little kid-feeling notion that reality is just a fabric that you can stretch and make answerable to your benevolent and joy-infused will. You will take this internal click and be led by it, into rooms filled with worthwhile people, into conversations, into states of mind that make conversations more than manageable and even at times enticing, and you will not cut down these people with whom you interact with pre-emptive cynicism that veils your fear that they might cut you down first. You will simply flow in and out of various interactive tableaus with magnanimous ease, and you will bask in the corona of light that surrounds this night, which is exactly the kind of night that young creative happy people who are successful by their own standards of success always seem to be having.
2) Tonight you will sit on a couch and play co-pilot to your semi-close friend, who, armed with the remote, will flip from channel to channel in search of a new distraction. You will drink six of the cheapest beers one can buy, and toss off sarcastic comments concerning the array of images your friend puts before you. You will intermittently break from the television to talk of things that happened in the recent past, when the two of you were closer, and each of you will secretly half-heartedly resent what the other has made out of him or herself before quelling your envy and resuming the peculiar enjoyment you glean from your friend’s company. Your time together will end with an awkward hug that you thought would be a handshake, and you will go home with a foreshortened sense of what the next week of your life might look like.
3) You will fill your newfound friend’s sink with water tonight and take gravity bong hits of Christmas tree weed from a milk carton you’ve cut in half as your newfound friend, with whom you made acquaintance earlier in the night while severely intoxicated, regales you with stories of his or her life before coming to the city. You will also succumb to nostalgia, find in him or her a radiant charm, and commit various indiscretions that sometimes take place between two young consenting adults overcome with desperation that has nothing to do with other people in the least. You will then, in classic big city fashion, sneak out of his or her apartment early tomorrow morning, and catch a cab, and for the duration of the ride to your lonely apartment, within which you and your thoughts will end up wrestling one another for hours, a deep sense of increasing shame inscribes itself on your heart.
4) You will go to a quiet bar for a quiet drink, gaze at the mirror behind the bar and see someone luminous walking behind you, and instantly fall in love tonight. The bartender will dry glasses with a white towel while eying you and discerning what has just transpired. He will nod knowingly, and, a true comrade-in-arms, bring her a drink and point to you. She will smile and cast her eyes to the floor. But then you will doubt yourself, ascribe the feeling to the music you heard on the ride to the bar or the cough medicine you talk earlier this afternoon, leave your drink and go home to fall asleep to a dream of grabbing at a lizard and having its tail come off in your hand.
5) Tonight your mother will call and tell you, in her clenched-fist voice, that her mother has died. You will make arrangements to return home, feeling empty and detached from the goings on around which your entire life used to be constellated. You will feel like you are endangering yourself by staying in your apartment alone so you walk the streets and shift everything that you see on the street to the slant of your solemn perspective. You will walk for hours, first in squares and then long out-and-backs before buying a bottle of red wine and sitting on a stoop of a neighboring apartment watching cars and cabs drive by. You will not cry, and there is nothing wrong with that.