It is very early or very late, depending on your perspective, and my friends are still sleeping as I leave the apartment. Night and morning swim side by side. Exhausted and bewildered, I lumber into the backseat of the cab while the taxi driver loads my suitcase into the trunk, and I crack a window to let out some of the savory, fetid aroma saturating the car. The driver gets in front, and asks in heavily-accented English, “You want for to pay inkesh?”

“What?”

“You want for to pay inkesh? Kesh.”

“Oh. Yeah, in cash.”

We drive away from my friend’s apartment, through the city, heading to LaGuardia. In keeping with her insomnic reputation, New York is humming at 4 AM; through the window I see the glow of several diners and delis still serving customers with an eerie sense of numb routine.

The weight of goodbye never settles on me until after I’ve gone. At the time of a significant farewell, “goodbye” is just a word, and involves a rather tedious process I’d just as soon get over with.

OK, I love you, but hugging me longer is just staving off the inevitable, and I don’t want to come across as frigid, kids, but one of us has a plane to catch. Deep breath and go before we start wondering who’s Bergman and who’s Bogart.

The finalities seldom hit me until the people I’m leaving are out of the frame. “I’ll be sad later,” I assure, and that's always true, but I worry at the time of goodbye that they don’t know how much I’ll miss them.

The party this weekend featured a minor fatality in which a bottle of raspberry Stoli shattered on the kitchen floor, and the next morning, my friend Erin realized she had a sliver of glass embedded in one of her toes. After some minor surgery involving Meghan tweezing at Rin’s toes while Rin bit through a bed-pillow, Rin’s feet were splinter-free.

“You never realize what it’s like to have glass in your feet until it’s yanked out,” she said while limping a recovery lap around the living room (avoiding the couch, which also somehow got broken during the party).

By way of highly distended metaphor, friends are like shards of glass. You stumble on them quite accidentally, avoid the painful extraction as long as possible, and never really appreciate the effect they have on your stride until they’re gone.

The cab drops me at the airport while the sky is a still sea of black, I haul my bag out of the trunk and zombie my way to the gate with the rest of the pre-dawn travelers. One young man separates from the horde and makes a bee-line to the Ms. Pac Man arcade game further down the hall, somehow alert enough to test his motor skills with joysticks and animated bloop-bloops while he waits to board the plane. The rest of us drones continue to the inadequately cushioned chairs in Gate G-5 and sit, or plop our luggage on the dingy carpet and attempt to use them as cushions.

I stare out the window at the runway, almost asleep, and giggle to myself remembering scenes from my visit, while the night acquiesces to sunrise. After a few more private giggles on the plane, I fall asleep, and wake up when the wheels touch the runway. Then, I start to miss everyone.

These were friends I had grown accustomed to seeing and laughing with almost every day for close to four years, and appreciating the precious nature of our visit leaves a hole. Sorry for the moping.

Recently, my heart has been continuously soaked and wrung dry, soaked and wrung dry. I hate to be so glass-half-empty about it, because I’m very lucky to have had so many important people to visit these past few weeks, but the heart needs a little time to sigh as I re-acclimate to being back home for an extended period of time.

As boring as it sometimes is to hear about other people’s dreams, in effort to end on a less whiny note, I gotta tell you about a wacky one I had last night.

I and some friends (whom I haven’t seen or heard from in years) were being held captive by sadistic weirdoes in the basement of some awful, horror-movie-ish house. I don’t know how long we had been there, but I think it was some months, and that we had been subjected to various forms of torture.

I somehow managed to break free, and swam through the swampy basement to a rope by the window, and I climbed to freedom. I was trying to be as quiet as possible, but as soon as I was free of the bonds, my friends started cheering me on. I was all paranoid that the noise would attract our captors, and tried to shush them.

Anyway, so I climbed through the window and ran through the backyard to a beach, where there happened to be a bunch of cops who I directed to the house. The cops went to the house, ostensibly to free my friends. As soon as I was alone on the beach I let out a few long, primal screams. It was awesome.

~ Last Five Entries ~

Moths, and Relative Nonsense - 08.18.05

I Finally Have Internet Access in my Bedroom. But, No Ashtray. - 08.09.05

Here I Am - 08.02.05

One-Armed Paper Hanger Earns her Wings - 07.29.05

Sugar & Lemon - 07.28.05

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BUY JEN'S BOOK! BUY IT! DO IT!

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BUY DEAN'S BOOK, TOO! YOU KNOW YOU WANNA! SERIOUSLY.

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