Then of course, there’s the nice kind of recognition: the pretty moms in Alo Yoga sets who come up to me at Erewhon and apologize for interrupting, but they have to tell me how much they love the show. And sometimes I get a free drink or a discount on something from someone I’ll never see again who wants me to like them. More often than not, the people who recognize me don’t say anything, they just send anonymous updates on my whereabouts to Deuxmoi.

“Bye, Cillian!” says one of the girls who was flirting earlier. “Love you!”

They all crack up, doing that oh my God you’re being SO crazy! thing drunk girls do together.

The bartender—Cillian, I’m guessing—gives a good-natured shake of the head and then a wave.

They go through the doors, and as they do, another girl soars in past them. She pushes through the crowd and sits right down at my table.

“Christ on a bloody knitting needle, you’ll never believe the night I’ve had,” she says.

She has shockingly blue eyes, long dark hair, and porcelain skin sprinkled with freckles. She reminds me immediately of Aisling Bea, and I feel certain she gets that all the time. Even without the accent, she’s a dead ringer.

“I went on that date, yeah,” she goes on, “with the guy me mam set me up with, the one from her work? Well, she failed to tell me that he’s in his fifties and is, and I quote, in the pre-separation stage of leaving his wife. I need a bloody drink. As if I’m not locked already.”

She gets up and goes to the bar, now emptier and absent of the hot bartender. She reaches behind the counter, fills her own beer from the tap, and comes back.

I don’t know who this girl is, but just as I felt an immediate attraction to that Cillian guy, I instantly find her endearing.

Is everyone just drunk? I mean, I’ve gone into bar bathrooms by myself on nights out and come out with girlfriends I swear I’ll keep for life. Sometimes it’s like that when it’s late and you’re tipsy. Especially if you’ve been on some awful date. Maybe she saw a female person around the same age as herself and thought, why not?

“I mean, when I was in school,” she goes on, “if I brought over a boyfriend who was even a year above me, Mam treated me like Lolita. Now she thinks Arthur from the accounting department might be the treat? Kay Donahue, the world’s most insane mam. I swear it.”

“Yikes,” I say, at a loss for anything but cartoon words.

She gives a derisive spike of laughter. “Tell me about it.”

A plate is set loudly down in front of me, and a bowl set down beside that.