It is all first impressions and impossible odds: the coincidence that feels ordained, the conversation that runs three hours past its natural end, the certainty that this one is different. Reality is still waiting in the wings, and for now it can keep waiting.
Everything is heightened by novelty. You are meeting the best-edited version of a stranger and offering the same in return, and the not-knowing is its own thrill, a whole person still folded up and waiting to be discovered.
The music opens wide and bright, the sound of a story about to start. Upward momentum, a lift under the chorus, that first-night sense that the whole city has quietly rearranged itself in your favour.
This is the threshold the whole arc keeps returning to: the beginning, alive with possibility. Play it walking home from the first good night, before anything has had the chance to complicate it.