Open Late

It was in that strange part of the evening where you realised there was no plan, no agenda and no time to stick to. No pressure, for a change. Yet, somehow you are caught posied ready to move, ready to decide, even though there is nothing to decide.

I found myself wrapped up in decisions and choices on what to do.

Do I go out?

Where do I go?

Who do I call?

Do I even want to go out? Do I even want to see anyone?

Even though nothing had happened yet, I somehow already feel like I should have decided what kind of night it is going to be.

It was early evening. Too late to pretend I was going to have a productive night and too early to admit I was probably just going to sit there wondering whether I should be doing something else.

I had that familiar feeling of wanting to go out.

Not because there was somewhere specific I needed to be. There was just the sense that something was happening somewhere else. Music. People. Movement. That feeling that life was continuing and maybe I should go and find it.

But there was another thought underneath it.

Do I actually want to go?

Since I stopped drinking, that question has become more complicated.

By then I'd been sober for around ten months, after a health scare that changed the way I looked at alcohol and quite a few other things. I initially thought the biggest change would simply be not drinking.

It wasn't.

It was noticing how much else had been attached to it.

The rituals.

The familiarity.

The little things that made going out feel easier.

A drink before leaving the house. Something in your hand when you walk into a room. That small adjustment between being at home and suddenly being surrounded by other people.

I never really thought of those things as necessary.

But once they were gone, I noticed them.

There was no buffer anymore.

Everything was just as it was.

Some nights that felt completely liberating.

Other nights, standing in the kitchen at seven o'clock, it just meant having an argument with yourself about whether you actually wanted to go out or whether you liked the idea of being someone who went out.

That night I couldn't decide.

So I went into the studio.

There wasn't really a plan.

I wasn't trying to make something meaningful. I wasn't trying to prove that I could have a good night without drinking. I wasn't searching for some breakthrough.

I just put some music on.

Then another track.

Then another.

At first I was still thinking about the evening. Whether I should go out. Whether I was wasting the night. Whether I ought to be doing something else.

Eventually I noticed I wasn't thinking about any of that anymore.

I was listening.

That was it.

There is a point when making music where you stop trying to direct everything and start responding to what you're hearing. A track leads somewhere, you follow it. Something doesn't feel right, you change it. Another thing works and you leave it alone.

I like that part.

There isn't much room for overthinking because the next decision is usually right in front of you.

The session started to move without me really deciding where it was going.

And gradually I stopped thinking about whether I should have gone out.

I was already somewhere.

That was the thing I hadn't expected.

I hadn't left the house.

I hadn't had a drink.

I hadn't needed to make myself more confident or more sociable or more anything.

I was just listening to music and enjoying being completely absorbed by it.

It made me think about how much importance I'd given to the things that came before a good night.

The drink before the night.

The ritual before the conversation.

The permission before the feeling.

I'd spent a long time assuming those things helped me get somewhere.

Maybe they did.

But maybe they were just things I'd become used to doing on the way there.

Because the part of me that wanted to move, to feel something, to connect with music, hadn't disappeared.

It was still there.

I just had to meet it without the usual shortcuts.

The music didn't feel like a replacement for going out.

It didn't need to.

It was simply enough.

The longer the session went on, the less I was aware of myself making it. The choices became instinctive. The room seemed to change even though nothing in the room had actually changed.

I stopped checking whether I was enjoying myself.

I just was.

That feels obvious writing it down.

It didn't feel obvious then.

There was something quite freeing about discovering that I hadn't lost the part of myself that could disappear into music. I'd just assumed I needed certain things around it.

Maybe that's what connection looks like sometimes.

Not another person arriving.

Not a room full of people.

Just a moment where you stop keeping yourself at a distance.

By the end of the session, I wasn't thinking about going out anymore.

I wasn't particularly thinking about staying in either.

I was just there.

I think that's why I still like this one.

It reminds me that not every evening needs to become something.

Sometimes you can sit with the uncertainty for a while.

Sometimes you can start playing music without knowing what you're looking for.

Sometimes you don't need the old entrance.

You just need to walk through the door.