“What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?” -John Green.

I boarded the final train of the night from Boston to Providence around midnight.

In my fingertips I sensed that increasingly familiar purr of midnight, the way it quivered and undulated under the heavy breath of its far-reaching shadow, fogging up the windows, hissing in the florescent glow of the overhead lights, tugging at our eyelids to stay open in spite of an inexorable promise of plans gone awry, choices made in flighty fashions.

Midnight and I, we’ve gotten to know one another well.

This particular train was thick with the scent of midnight. I leaned on my best friend Annabel, pressed my head to her shoulder, and felt the palm of midnight’s hand against my cheek.

Three minutes into the ride, when Annabel and I turned to one another in panic at the realization that we’d gotten on the wrong train, midnight got its way.

Midnight is not always 12:00am. It can drift in at any time of night and it is a great deal less consistent.

Midnight, impish and erratic as an articulate phrase from our 45th president, appears when plans need to be sabotaged. Midnight is the little boy in his Terrible Two’s, pulling table cloths from freshly set tables, screaming instead of sleeping, drawing dinosaurs in sharpie on the walls. Midnight is impervious to plans. Or maybe midnight just doesn’t care.

Midnight laughed when Annabel and I got off the train at the next stop from Boston, a deserted strip of concrete illuminated by dim, flickering light bulbs and crawling with unidentifiable shadows. When we huddled together against the train timetables, tracing the board with our frozen fingers to find out if we’d be stuck or if another train would come to our rescue, midnight giggled.

Midnight giggled when essentially the same thing happened to me in Ireland, when a late night bus dropped my friends and me at the edge of the universe, in a forlorn and ill-lit town, one endless street under an artificial yellow glow, three dopey Americans waiting for our newfound Irish friends to swoop in from… Where? Behind a bush? (Seriously, we were in the middle of fucking nowhere). So we laughed at the hilarity of our lost-ness, the ever-increasing possibility of our night ending at the bottom of a ditch, and the biting, midnight Irish cold. Then we sucked it up, trudged a mile down a perpetually lengthening, seemingly abandoned road, and had a remarkably special night once we located the rest of humanity.

But the part I’ll remember most was getting stranded in the middle of Irish Nowhere.

Midnight leaves me seething in the moment because it diverts my hope for a perfect plan as easily as a gust of wind sweeps autumn leaves from the pavement. It does not engage in thoughtful discourse before scribbling all over the blueprints of an impeccably planned evening.  It simply scribbles.

So, I either draw a new plan or crumple up the first and say “fuck it.”

When my cousin Jacob and I finished seeing The Neighbourhood perform at the Riviera Theater in Chicago, we expected nothing out of the ordinary to await us in the parking lot where we’d left his car. What we found was exactly that: nothing.

A wild goose chase through the rougher parts of Chicago, way too much cash in our pockets to feel safe running down streets that moved south, and the heavy thud, thud, thudding heartbeat that accompanies a midnight digression kept our feet from touching the ground.

Needless to say, we hadn’t planned for things to go in such a manner.

But I remember that night a hell of a lot more clearly than I would if we’d stopped at Dunkin Donuts after the concert then headed home according to plan.

The misadventures seem to suck in the moments you’re living them. They feel like a failure. And the more times you rip out a new sheet of paper to draw up another blueprint, to reroute when you’ve already taken a road uncharted, the worse it’s going to suck.

But my midnight misadventures are not so much setbacks as they are integral pieces of my exceptionally bizarre and profound experience. I don’t find stories of flawlessly executed plans to be very scintillating, and I don’t particularly care to tell stories of such stale content either.

So the more times I bump into midnight on train cars that turn out to be wrong or on eerily abandoned streets in Maynooth, Ireland or on empty parking lot spaces where a red Toyota should’ve been, the better.

If we don’t have stories to tell, tales of whimsical setbacks to recount with retrospective humor and gratitude, we don’t have much of anything. No lessons learned, no winding plot lines to unfold, no rise and fall of adventure and thrill. Just a bunch of useless, unsullied blueprints.

And me, the writer? I’m living for the mishaps.