I miss bad pints, the smell of cigarettes indoors and girls you won't talk to. Watching them put the chairs up. Nodding at familiar faces you don't know on the way out of the bar. Three a.m. pizza and afterwards the offsales and the old records and heavy eyelids. Falling asleep as the light touches the skyline.
...
I have, I know, a good life, a home, love, friends and family. I know very few people whom I can look at and say with any conviction I envy. The best people I know have what I have. Others have changed or been discarded like old clothes during a spring cleaning. So why regret? Because no matter where I am, I feel like I could have gotten here another way, one that was more exciting or interesting or memorable.
...
Looking back, I can't believe how much of me there is on this thing. the essence of the me who was anyway. The anger, the outrage, the hangovers: all tempered now by time. Yet I'm still fundamentally the same, even though so much else is different. Or is it?
...
I'm on my third city in four years. The biggest city and move so far, and yet I feel like I've come full circle. It's a bit dirty and grey here, just like home. My job now is much like the one I left when I first changed cities. I'm just as unsure about what I'm doing as I was then, but I'm on a different side of 30 now, looking ahead to a future where the margins for error are thinner and expectations higher. It's tough, this grown up business, which is why I'm back here. trying to find a bit of the old me, keeping the reckless, feckless spirit of those boozy old days alive for a little while longer.
