It can always find an occasion

Today is different, and it might genuinely be. A birthday. A funeral. The thing you got. The thing you lost. A Friday that felt earned. The argument writes itself from there: this is not a normal day, so the normal rule does not apply tonight. And it is true that the day is unusual. What is not true is the part that follows, because the day did not make the offer. The offer was out looking for a day, and this one happened to qualify.

Look at your own calendar for the next year. There is no month without an occasion in it. Weddings, hard anniversaries, the last day of something, the first night of a holiday, an ordinary Tuesday that goes badly enough to count. If a big enough day is a valid exception, then the exception is not rare at all, it is a schedule. A clause you can invoke whenever you need it is not a clause. It quietly voids the whole agreement it was written into.

There is a better use for a big day anyway. You get to go to it as the free version of you, which is fairly new and not a small thing. Present at the meal instead of stepping out to smoke. Actually in the photographs. Still there at the end of the night, remembering all of it, driving somebody home. The occasion was never improved by leaving it every forty minutes. It was interrupted, every single time, and you paid for each interruption.

So go, and let the day be the event. Eat the food. Stay late. Talk to the person you never talk to. If the pull comes, it will come in the same shape it always does and pass in the same handful of minutes, and nobody at that table will know it happened except you and God. The day does not need anything added to it. You are the part of it that got better since the last one.