Songs that feel like this
- It's post-exams, pre-holidays, everyone knows they won't see each other for a while and so, without anyone saying it, there is a feeling of having to make the most of things.
- You're somewhere in the city where the nightlife is concentrated, where the restaurants are full and people stand outside them waiting for tables, drinking, smoking, talking too loudly.
- You've had a few drinks. You're walking with your friends, or standing on the pavement, or sitting across from them at a restaurant, laughing, smiling, cheeks hurting.
- People are touching all the time, but no one seems to notice. Shoulders brush. Someone leans into you to speak, although the music isn't particularly loud. A hand rests on an arm, a knee against a knee beneath the table, someone's fingers briefly at the small of your back as you move through a crowd. There is something intimate about it, but nothing definite. Nothing that could be pointed to afterwards and explained. The gestures are casual, almost unconscious, and yet you are aware of them. You are aware of everything. The warmth of another person's body beside yours. The way someone's eyes seem darker in the low light. The pause before a smile, the look that lasts a fraction longer than it needs to.
- There is a feeling in the air, a kind of tension that has nowhere in particular to go. It moves between you and your friends, but it doesn't stop there. You notice it in the people waiting outside the restaurant, in strangers passing on the street, in the groups gathered beneath the lights of bars.
- Everyone seems a little more beautiful than usual, or perhaps simply more available to being seen. People make eye contact. They smile at one another. They stand too close and don't move away. The whole city seems to have entered into a tacit agreement to be a little less guarded.
- Everything feels slightly heightened. Not dramatic, not even particularly romantic.
- Later, you'll remember almost none of what was said. You'll remember the light on the pavement, the crush of bodies outside a restaurant, the sound of your friends laughing. You'll remember the feeling of being among people and wanting nothing more than to remain there, in that particular arrangement of bodies and voices and warmth, for a little longer.
- For a moment, the whole world feels available to you.