06.27.23
To take a shower in your own bathroom, washing a plane from your skin with your own products and your own towel and your own setup after some time away, is an unmatched catharsis.
Saraphina and I left her house in Longmont, CO at 9:15pm MST. I arrived back in my apartment in New York at 10am EST, nearly eleven hours of travel under my belt and delirious from exhaustion, as sleeping on planes was never my strong suit. First, a two-hour delay of my red eye flight home. I paced around the airport, already tired but trying to stay awake to better my chances of sleeping in the air. I ultimately found a couch, twenty gates down from the one my JetBlue flight would eventually depart from, next to the loudest construction area I’ve ever heard at midnight. I laid down and listened to I Said No Gifts and rested my head on my backpack, overstuffed with a week’s worth of my things. I crane my neck to avoid my angular toiletries, seeking the softer gallon-bagged bathing suit on top, still damp from a trip to the reservoir for paddle boarding this morning. The couch is maybe more like the bench of a booth in a diner, but I fall asleep for twenty or so minutes before a woman cleaning accidentally touches my foot, waking me.
I boarded around two in the morning and flew to New York in a middle seat. I tried to sleep but couldn’t get my body to relax. Unfortunately, I took a Benedryl to try and ease the process of falling asleep, but it didn’t work, so instead I just felt insane for several hours, awake when I shouldn’t be per my brain, blood, and body. But so it goes. We flew to New York, landed at JFK, and then sat on the tarmac for an hour after landing, taxiing between gates and waiting. Finally, we were released, and I got a taxi back to my apartment for a cool hundred dollars that I don’t really have to spend. I fell asleep in the back of the cab, which I always try not to do, especially when alone, but Benedryl had other plans.
I open my windows to air out my apartment, stuffy from being shut up for a week. I am completely exhausted, to a degree I have not experienced in years. I hate not sleeping. But a long travel day is a very small price to pay for a week with my best friend — nothing can rejuvenate, revive, invigorate a person like that. Saraphina and I do an activity or two every day when I’m at her place — a walk, a bike ride, a big hike if we’re feelin’ kooky crazy (not really the vibes we brought to this year’s trip, more leisurely strolling, which was so wonderful) — but even just sitting in a room, on our respective phones or laptops and chatting idly, or sitting in her car’s passenger seat, where I have Simply Belonged since college, feels like the greatest pleasure I could experience. Saraphina and I live two time zones away from each other, sending forty to eighty minute voice memos back and forth several times a week, but to share physical space with someone with whom you share a very simple understanding is such a joy. I want nothing more in my life then to enjoy time walking, chatting, laughing, talking shit, brainstorming, writing, wandering with her. She is my soulmate.
Also — not for nothing — I also had the great honor of seeing a live reading of Saraphina’s screenplay Tiny Vessels at a local theater company she works with, and it brought me to tears. The material itself, of course, very effective — funny, heartbreaking, beautiful. But I was mostly moved by how fortunate I am to have such great talent so close to me. When the reading ended, and the last gorgeous image was read out loud by the director, I blubbered into a puddle. When I hugged her after it only got worse. Just a total mess. Can’t believe I get to witness her greatness. Can’t believe I get to have her as my best friend. I’m literally crying right now writing this, ew! Don’t look at me!
Time for volleyball, running on fumes. I am fueled exclusively, today, by friendship. And Diet Coke, obviously.
