Knicks in 5

I almost canceled my housewarming.

The date I’d picked, Saturday June 13th, turned out to be game 5 of the Finals. Knicks and Spurs, and the series had been close enough every night that nobody could call which way it would go. I sat with the calendar and talked myself out of it twice. If the Knicks lost, the whole night would deflate. Who throws a party on the night the city might get its heart broken. I’m a believer, I wanted them to win, but wanting it didn’t make the game any less of a coin flip.

I held the party anyway.

We opened with Flip 7, which felt right for the night. It’s a push-your-luck card game, you keep flipping for more points and decide when to stop before a card busts you. I was doing the same thing with the whole evening, betting it all on a game I had zero say in. Friends came, then some friends of my roommate I’d never met, and for the first stretch it was just board games and people getting to know each other in my new place.

Then the Knicks won.

What happened after that I could not have planned for if I’d tried. The train into the city was packed with people chanting “Knicks in 5,” strangers high-fiving and dancing in the car. There were fireworks going off over the blocks and droves of people spilling into the streets. None of it was on my calendar. None of it was anything I made happen.

That’s the part I keep turning over. The best moments of that week were the exact ones I’d been most scared I couldn’t control. I didn’t earn the win and I couldn’t schedule the train ride. All I did was hold the party and let the night be whatever it was going to be. The magic showed up because I made room for it, not because I steered it.

I think about this constantly now because it’s the whole problem I’m building fikastay around. I’ve written before about how a group trip usually dies in the seven-thread group chat, four friends trying to lock dates and a house and a budget, everyone quietly trying to engineer the perfect trip, and the trip dying before anyone gets on a plane. The cruel part is that the perfect trip was never the controllable stuff. The good part of a vacation is the part nobody plans. The detour, the night that goes long, the stranger you end up talking to. You can’t put that on the itinerary, you can only get everyone in the same place long enough for it to find you.

I love traveling solo. My first real trip was to Japan, alone, right after I graduated, and being present is easy when there’s no one to negotiate the plan with. But you can’t high-five a stranger by yourself. The moments I actually want from travel are the shared ones, and those only happen with other people in the room, which means they only happen if the group can get past the part where pulling the trip off feels like too much.

I learned that again the following Thursday. The victory parade ran that morning, from the Financial District up to City Hall, and I went and stood in the crowd soaking up as much of the happy energy as I could hold. By the afternoon I was wrecked, fried from a full week of celebrating, but I dragged myself to a writers’ circle anyway, a Reading Rhythms event hosted by Ben at a space called Lightning Society. I didn’t think I had a single useful word in me. I sat down next to Andrew, a teacher writing short stories he wants to shape into a memoir, and Lexis, working on a novel about a twin chasing the Olympics. Neither of them knows yet what their thing will become. They’re finding out by making it. I’m not sure what shape fikastay will take in the end either. But my energy lifted just from sitting in a room of people working on the same thing, and an hour earlier I’d been ready to write the night off.

That dip, the “I don’t have what it takes tonight” feeling right before the good thing happens, is the moment fikastay exists for. I’m not building a way to control the perfect trip. I’m building the thing that gets a group past “this is too hard, let’s just cancel” so they’re still together when the uncontrollable, legendary part of the trip finally shows up. Hold the party anyway, and let the magic do the rest.