Calm

It's calming, soothing really, to walk home on a night when slush falls from the sky in plops and you're wearing the wrong shoes and the wrong coat and soaked pant legs sop against your ankles in rhythm, but it doesn't matter because you've drank a couple pints of Guinness and a talked a couple hours with some unlikely boy friends about your religion and dating websites that sometimes suck and sometimes don't, and what exactly are the crucial relationship deal-breakers, and if it is ever possible to know that you've met someone you just know you have have to be with........and you don't really want the ride home these boys offer, because this discussion is something you want to contemplate on your own for the 45 minutes down Arlington Street and across the Jimmy Kelly Bridge and up Broadway into the blowing spit, because when you're thinking about 4 boys you like who you're trying to navigate and a couple others who you have no control over but can never stop thinking about, not to mention the dozens of others you should go find and line up in case the first 4 go thud and the couple others refuse to stop weighing down your mind with your should-haves and their f#$%-ups and your f#$%-ups.....there's something about walking in the February rain in the dark by yourself that makes you wish for calm, for ease, for surety, in part, because in at least a couple of those 45 minutes such things seem possible.