After a night of drinking we were talking about freedom, and wild abandon … something we’d both thought of as our life’s work when we were 10 years younger, and didn’t know each other: when I was in Russia getting drunk at a different club every night, and she was in Sweden making love to an older woman who’d promised to show her the world.
The difference was, she’d let go of herself all that time … and floated away from every limit, while I had been searching, hunting for that thing that would take my boundaries away, the holy grail of bliss through amnesia, and never found it. The further away I went from my home and hearth, the more deeply I sank into the man who’d sat in front of them.
“Did you ever find it?” I asked her as we walked down the cool Oakland street, almost at midnight, almost at the hour when the trains stopped. “Did you ever find freedom in wild abandon?”