We pulled up to the vegan ice cream truck. It was closed.
"What? I swear it said open 'til nine." Ryan checked his phone. "Yeah, see?"
He handed me the phone. It did.
"What do you want to do?" he asked.
I thought.
"Well. There're those purple lights on Raleigh Road. We can take the photos there. You brought your camera, right?"
He pulled it out. It was vintage and I was wearing a vintage jacket I got at the thrift store last week for six dollars and we were going to do a vintage photo shoot. Because it was fall break and there weren't many students on campus, which made the night cooler and more fun.
"Yeah. But I kinda want ice cream first."
"There's Ben and Jerry's on Franklin."
"Yeah, sure."
We arrived ten minutes later. I ordered vegan cookie dough and chocolate swirl.
Ryan ordered a milkshake with milk.
We sat outside.
I ate my ice cream. The spoon was wooden, and I liked that. I dug in and tasted the vanilla on my tongue and the chocolate and the chunks of cookie dough that were like little treasures in the swirl of white and brown. The best part of cookie dough is when you think you're out of it but then you take a bite anyway, because good ice cream is still good ice cream, and suddenly you find one in your mouth. Like a little secret, between only you and the dough.
I sat and I ate and I thought about how the wooden spoon made it taste better. And then I thought about if it even made a difference and if so how much, and how it was like using a metal straw instead of a plastic one, or like using wooden chopsticks at a Japanese restaurant instead of a plastic fork to help save the fish in the sea as you ate sushi made of fish in the sea. I also thought of how using a wooden spoon didn't help the environment all that much if you drank dairy milk a mother cow made for her baby and how the whole thing didn't even make sense because you wouldn't drink rhino milk or zebra milk even though it's similar to human milk and how forty million tons of grain can end world hunger but twenty times that is fed to factory farmed animals each year and how everything will probably end up in the trash anyway.
"...but I don't think that just because you wait for something means it has to be better than if you got it right away. It's not like the universe owes you anything. It's like...coincidences. And randomness. Not everything in the universe can line up perfectly for you. Because that wouldn't be random anymore, wouldn't be coincidence. And beauty lies in coincidence, I think, in letting you make your own sense of what you see."
"What're we waiting for?"
"My friend Lucas hasn't had his first kiss yet."
"Oh."
"He said it's gonna be better than everyone else's first kisses ‘cause it's taken him twenty plus years to have it, thinks it's building up ‘goodness'."
"Oh. How did we get to talking about kissing?"
"Don't worry about it." He was quiet. "You know, I haven't, either. Had my first kiss."
I looked at him. He shrugged.
Then he said more stuff but I didn't listen. I thought about Ryan's words and how he said just because you wait for something doesn't mean it'll be worth it because not everything in life has to be fair. And I wanted to disagree, wanted to think things happened for a reason. But then I thought how you don't have to be desperate to find meaning to recognize that something doesn't have to have any greater significance that it simply does, to recognize you aren't special, and still accept it, still appreciate it for what it is.
I looked up. Ryan was looking at me funny. "Every last drop, huh?"
I stopped scraping the cup and smiled. "I can eat a whole tub."
He laughed. He'd barely touched his shake.
"You don't like it?"
"Just waiting for it to melt. It tastes better that way."
We started walking.
"You never told me about the lights," he said.
"Yeah? I said they glow deep neon purple and look cool at night, remember?"
"Sure. But what's their story?"
"I don't know. I didn't install them. I just always see them when I drive here. The rest are regular and then there's just a couple...purple lights." I paused. "I guess I don't really know."
We arrived at the purple lights. But they weren't there. "Huh? They should be here, I swear they always are. Every time I drive this hill." I opened Maps on my phone, as if it would help us, as if ‘Purple Lights' would glow like a landmark, as if we were special.
"You sure we're in the right place?"
"I'm positive."
He didn't seem bothered. "Oh. If you could write a story, like, right here, right now, what would the first sentence be?"
"The stupid lights were purple before but now they're not because the world sucks and the time we finally bring ourselves to go to the vegan ice cream truck it's closed. And I'd title it ‘Shit'."
He found that funny. "Maybe we should wander out more often then. Increase our odds. And maybe that's why the universe doesn't always make good things happen when you wait. Because maybe it doesn't want us to wait. Life is long, but it's actually short, and if we wait the good things might never come."
Then he asked if I wanted to go geocaching.
We found ourselves in a graveyard. A graveyard, one of those places where you don't know if you should pay your respects through prayer, keep quiet or make insensitive jokes for your own sake and sanity.
It doesn't matter. The dead can't hear.
"Imagine being dead," Ryan stated.
I couldn't tell if he was joking. I looked over. The corners of his lips were tugged up.
"Imagine being alive," I replied.
He was quiet for a moment. He pulled a shovel out of a mound. "Imagine."
"Why'd you do that?"
He held it horizontal, twisted it in his hands. "A geo. I'm gonna hang it on my wall when I get home to remember this night."
We looked at the pile of dirt, the hole it left behind. At the tombstone, the blankness on its face, except for one word: Leo. No last name.
I wondered if Leo had anything to live for.
"Probably lots of things."
I turned to Ryan and realized I wondered out loud. "What do you have to live for?"
"Lots of things."
"Like what?"
"Family, friends, aspirations. Future children, maybe."
I counted on my fingers. "That's only four."
"Guess it is, then."
We sat on a ledge close by. I took out my phone, searched up ‘purple lights'.
"Right now I'm feeling...actually, I don't know. How're you feeling, Lyd?"
"Chapel Hill: streetlights seem to be glowing purple lately?" 
I tapped the headline. 
"Residents of Chapel Hill report seeing several purple lights over a few town streets come dusk. Theories have erupted—alien invasion? hidden toxins? an easier color on the eyes of drivers? or mere artistic expression? Fear not, folks. The harmless answer lies in—wait for it—faulty bulbs." 
"I don't know." I wasn't sure if I happy or sad we never got the pictures. The lights were nothing more than a mistake. They were fake, the Wizard of Oz. I wished I'd never searched them up.
"You okay?"
I nodded. Then I smiled.
I never told Ryan.
There's something sad about discovering the thing that you thought was real is actually not, that magic is actually ordinary. But with those revelations comes new perspective on life; you learn to create your own magic from subtlety and disregarded moments. We found a shovel that night and Ryan took pictures of me simply existing and we walked for miles and miles and his milkshake got all the way melted because it tasted better that way. And that was already four things to live for.