Once upon a time, there was a boy who built a snowman. And in the dead of night, while all the world was sleeping, the snowman came to life and took the boy for a marvelous adventure.
I stayed out much, much past my bedtime last night, at a housewarming party in Brooklyn that was exactly what I thought adult parties should be like when I was a child: candles burning, mulled wine on the stove, and a group of people clustered around a piano, singing.
If I were writing this in a story, I would pull you into the scene, make you see his fingers flying across the keys, playing Liszt so fast his knuckles and fingertips blurred. You would know that the room was warm, almost too warm, windows fogged from all the bodies in motion. You would smell the cloves and cinnamon and orange peels from the wine simmering in the kitchen. At the end of the party, you, too, would feel a faint regret that the night was winding down, that the magic was beginning to ebb.
If this were a story, you would leave with some handsome young thing you’d found there, still singing to each other as you walked reluctantly toward the L train and the city and the apartment you live in alone. You might even stop somewhere along the way and kiss, and because this is fiction you will be standing under the streetlight in exactly the spot where the raindrops misting down look like falling stars.
The real world is somewhat more prosaic than the fictional world though, and though I walked out of the party with a handsome young thing, I left him somewhere around Grand Central, setting off in pursuit of a young thing of his own. I did, however, walk under a series of streetlights on my way from the subway to the apartment, and the raindrops falling through that glow of light looked exactly like falling stars.