On the JayDays of Wild Nights!

Wild nights! Wild Nights!

You can always tell if you are a reformed wild child. If you were once "wild", even the word sounds beautiful and smells like mildew in a forest after a storm. Like the damp belly of a wolf standing on a hill in that particular forest after the storm passes.

I was once wild, but now I have escaped the wildness of the world and kept it within, ready for sometime when I've become more mature and adept at my craft to let out all the madness and the fear and create art inspired by it.

If you have ever been wild, you are familiar with the feeling. The thrill of anti-conformity. The enjoyment of looks of disdain or disapproval from the docile, more composed majority. You know how fear can creep into your bones as you step into the wild, the bar, the party in strangers' homes, or friendships that you make without prior consideration or a background check. You understand the temptation of the glass. Can you stomach one more? You know what it feels like to be drunk in a stupor. I was once so drunk that I remembered being stuck in a VR room that rolled and swung as you tried to fly a virtual plane. I was upside down in the tight space, I was wearing a skirt that flew off above my head, and my poor knickers -hehehe, how British am I- were exposed to the asshole employees at the controls outside the VR room. That day when I got home totally wasted, I remembered getting stuck in that room with my legs above my head, and my body confined to the tightest space possible.

Being wild was scary, but it had its perks. You meet some of the coolest people when you're wild. You are deranged, poetic, angry, and unmatched in darkness. You text exes after a night of shots and screwdrivers. You wake up feeling ashamed and regretful, but you remember the wonderful poetry you texted your ex and sigh, "Would that sound intriguing in a book?" The answer most of the time will be: Yes!

In the years where wildness havocs your credit card, your relationship with your family, your mental health, and your health, you can easily hate the memory. Walking through lines of people you don't know. The dangerous men you meet along the way. Nicotine clogs your lungs. The burning sensation of the hookah filling your chest, the warmth followed by the insane tingling, the burning sensation and how you crave more despite feeling more lightheaded as the night pulls you in deeper. The lust that somehow drives your decisions and clouds your judgment, the men -especially the men- that ooze danger, a menacing field of power and destruction, and the sad, self-destructive women, who kiss you and cry even as you try to disentangle your sense of self from their grasp.

It's easy to dismiss all of that after one wild rampage. When you're sober and stable, your feet on solid ground, the world is your suitcase of opportunities. You have tasted the first bite of things that seemed foreign to you in the past: stability, security, calmness, sleep, safety, coziness, tranquility. Wildness would then seem like a distant angry sea. And the lure of the shore would be too lulling and pacifying to resist. And all the horrible things would lash at you in the middle of the night. The night when you almost got jumped by a group of assholes, if not for your high-alert sense of danger, that well-functioning fight or flight mode that you haven't shut off at the slightest hint of a scary situation. That night when you got thrown into a chaotic fling with a guy whom you learned later was a serial rapist using a potent date-rape drug, and how each time he tried to lure you into a night out alone with him, you always sought the company of others. How you had that near-brush with something that could have turned your world upside down, left you scarred beyond repair, or the damage would have taken more than paint and door fixation to put you back together.

So when you're remembering those thunderous days of wildness, you can easily kick them away into the dark recesses of your brain. But you can also kick the good times. The one where you met this really sensitive, cute guy at the writing workshop and took him on wild, late night dates. And then you met this alcoholic poet who chanted "I'm a prophet" in that crowded, vintage Alexandrian bar. You disliked him immediately only to cross paths with him years later at training for a crushing customer service daytime job. Years later, you're on a beautiful beach resort getaway, scrolling through Facebook to learn that he'd passed away, 35 years old.

How can you forget the day you tasted red wine for the first time? You sang out loud despite being uncomfortable about singing in front of strangers? Not that you have an outstanding set of pipes, but people never left you alone. "Sing" they'd say, as if poetry wasn't enough, the writing wasn't enough, the comedy wasn't enough, the artistry wasn't enough. They just had to milk other talent out of you and you lacked it, my child. You really did.

So now, in the comfort of your new life, when the years of being wild are so far behind that you can barely remember them through blurry images, and distant, muffled sounds, allow yourself to remember them. Allow yourself to miss those days when you could venture into the unknown, ask that asshole you were dating to walk with you to the beach at night, the waves angry, and the predator vibes coming off him so intense that you can barely shelter your bones. Remember and let go of all the days when you evaded someone leaving a mark on you. They grind at you with their teeth like that asshole who bit you when you were a teen, with your bare arm exposed through the window of a tram -a train on electricity- and how that made you too scared to ride public transportation and stay near an open window. Close your eyes and miss those wild days of spiraling out of control, letting go and never checking for the ground under your feet.