Choose Happiness

I’m eating warm plum brioche, standing in the kitchen. I’m making a lovely coffee with my coffee machine and fresh milk. My teeth are clean and I am not in pain. It’s raining outside and Vampire Weekend are playing on the Coffee Shop Indie radio station on Google Music. My afternoon is my own.

Vampire Weekend – Step

***

It’s 1am and I am riding through the night on my scooter. It’s 20 degrees and the moon is full. The air smells like magic. I am riding past my old university, watching the lights twinkle over the empty car park, thinking about all the failed relationships I had, and what I thought the future would hold. How everything was so amorphous and vague, and accordingly full of hope. What I thought 25 would look like. A house, a mortgage, a career, a car, a cat, a string of one night stands. I didn’t even have a career path. I studied Arts. The global financial crisis hit. I never could have understood. I’m very in touch with my younger selves, and that’s the one thing they never would have understood. Why I never ended up with a respectable job. Or a career at all. I just couldn’t conceive of a scenario where someone could so completely fall through the cracks. To not “choose life.”

Trainspotting “Choose Life” speech

I never thought I’d be riding past here like this, somehow. So adjacent to my dreams. Realising what a delusion so much of what you are sold about adult life is, how it isn’t happiness, how young 25 is. I have a cabin, a pension, a bike, a husband, polyamory, friends. And what does it matter beyond that? That I never had the big house, or fame, or riches? I accomplished my small goals. I’ve had dinner parties and travelled overseas and sung my songs to people I care about. So what if my life doesn’t get bigger from here? If I stay in this room? But I have another 25 years, and probably another; and it will. I have all these wonderful relationships, maybe that’s what would have been hardest to see, not falling off the career wagon, but having friends. Having all these people around me that I care about and that care about me.

***

Blur – Girls & Boys

I am standing next to the computer, “Girls & Boys” by Blur is playing and I find myself doing a silly little dance. I wonder why I am dancing and I realise it’s because I just got laid, and I smirk to myself, continually. Magnus has just left, concluding the most self-aware courtship ever, and some very fun sex. A new experience in poly, after 5 years, not without some trepidation, and it was so delightfully easy and good. My relationships and sex life have finally become everything my young mind dreamed they could be when I was younger, but didn’t have the concepts to explain. Sex just feels like this wondrous extra mode of communication, completely contiguous and integrated with talking and sharing experiences and getting to know someone, completely free of borders and labels and pretence. It’s one thing to say that you’re sexually liberated, or believe in free love, it’s another thing to truly live it. To find someone, many people, Dorian, Andrea and Magnus, and connect so well, talking about everything, every truth you can uncover about life and love and values and the meaning of life, in complete honesty, in banter and fun and debate; to want to get inside someone’s mind, inside their everything, in a joyous celebration of intellect and sensuality; a whole world of consent and enthusiasm and delight and skill and understanding. “I love your thoughts! Ugh! This is so stimulating! Let's tear off our clothes! Having sex is amazing!!” This is the vision of enlightened adulthood that I’d longed for, and yet thought would be impossible to achieve in a world so beset by repression and disingenuousness.

***

I’m making a second dinner of pasta and cheese, and the kitchen fan is ruffling the curtains next to the dining table, pulling in the spring night air and the delicious scent of the lilies that Dorian’s girlfriend Kara bought me. And I am happy. I am so fucking happy, I wish I could live in this moment forever.

The lilies on my dining table