The Best Moments

There is no guide to best moments. There aren’t any directions on how to get to them, or how to make them happen really. Best moments just sort of happen by themselves. They happen exactly when you need them.

The weird thing about best moments is that sometimes best moments are remixed worst moments. It all really depends on your frame of mind: you can be sitting on a stoop having a smoke and thinking, for example, and it can be the absolute Worst Moment because you feel lonely and friendless and desolate and flung too far out into the universe, basically like a general fuck-up; or, you can be doing exactly the same thing, only feeling centered and peaceful and fortunate and capable, and it’s totally different. That’s when you know you’re having a Best Moment.

Best moments happen when the universe winks in your direction.

When the perfect song for your mood comes on just when you need it, the song that describes how you feel without the words, the song that sounds like what you wish you could say even though the lyrics are all wrong. It’s not about what it says, it’s how it feels.

Best moments happen when you give yourself space. When you take a break from the way you think every day, when you leave off the internal push-and-pull and just concentrate completely on existing. Or when you set out to find something and come back with something better. Or when you stand around in the kitchen eating grapefruit to The Raveonettes and no one gives a damn.

You never know.

I’m pretty sure best moments happen when you finally come to terms with who and where you are, or when you realize that nothing inherently matters and feel incredibly free. When you experience a shift of focus. When that thing Camus said about the invincible summer finally starts making sense.

Or when you meet someone new and instantly know you’ve made a connection, made a friend you can stay out all night with drinking cheap wine on rooftops or couches or park benches and telling each other stupid stories. When you feel understood and relieved and content, as plainly happy as you felt when you were a kid and made your first friend.

Sometimes when you’re all alone and have no plans and you’re not sure you know anyone anymore and your bank account is laughably close to zero, the best moments happen and you feel the air settle against your skin and the asphalt underneath you reassuring it could hold you if you had to sleep there; the lights drop down and dissolve in your irises and you take breaths that expand your ribcage, letting in the world, inhale the molecules of blossom and decay and exhale something beautiful and different, your own contribution to the cosmic metropolis.