There’s a feeling that you sometimes get… The morning after a really good party. A quiet moment in the backseat of the car three hours into a car trip. Things like that. The feeling is really hard to describe. I guess if I had to put a word on it, it would be peaceful. Happiness, to a degree, but mostly peace. Like all your troubles have been lifted for a little while, leaving you completely undisturbed.
It seems like you almost need to be half asleep for this, but not always. I remember lying in the backseat of a car the morning after a cool party. There were two other people in the car, but it was a quiet moment between conversations. Burn by Sister Machine Gun was playing, and I misheard the chorus to say “You’re like a butterfly… and I’ll never be the same.”
It mostly seems to happen after good parties, when you’ve just spent the entire night talking to someone cool. I remember practically floating home the morning after I met Annie at a party her brother threw. I had the guitar solo of the Sublime song Right Back in my head and all was right with the world.
Last night, after my friends went home, I sat down on the bed and finished reading an Asimov book. While I was reading it, Annie came in and fell asleep next to me and the CD that was playing finished. I decided to go to bed and put in a Sarah Maclachlan CD. As Sweet Surrender came on, I was lying in bed, looking at the light clouds in the sky and thinking about how much light the city was shining in our window. I was wide awake and I felt completely at peace.
Sitting on a bench at the beach, just watching the endless roll of waves.
Standing on the roof of my apartment building watching fireworks go off over the cityscape spread out below my and my fellow trespassers.
Lying on the grass in a section of town I’d never been in, with a girl I didn’t know, looking at the stars.
Wandering through the neighborhood with a high school friend several late nights, discussing nothing in particular.
