Questions of Travel

Trey and I went to the Bay Area for a long weekend, weekend before last: a much-needed mini-vacation with NO FAMILY AROUND. I recommend taking a pleasure trip immediately post-Christmas holidays, since despite technically being time away from work that can be spent slothfully, it is never really restful, the undercurrent and intensity of even the most positive family time is just too fucking draining, compounded by the fact that it was my first Christmas since my mom died, not to mention the worst PMS of all time, PMS so pure and uncut that I wept ceaselessly through THIS, playing on the flat panel in my sister’s cozily appointed rec room. It turned out to be a very nice Christmas all the same.

But California! To be together, to sleep in a nice hotel, to see where Trey used to live, to fuck in the morning, to luxuriate in a proper bath, tasting air redolent of crushed eucalyptus and bathed in sunlight of an intensity and hue differing from Brooklyn's in a way not unlike the floodlighting Hollywood uses to indicate out-of-body experiences, astral projection, the after-life! I thought I knew from coffee, burritos, and Thai food, and I was wrong. The pigeons carry themselves differently there: banking sharply, abrupt air-braking: toy helicopters to the relaxed paper-airplane flights of New York pigeons. And I was surprised not to find San Francisco wanting as a city, not to have that experience of other cities as cities-playing-dress-up, cities-clomping-about-in-their-mother’s-high heels.

I met some of Trey’s closest friends for the first time, about whom I had only heard stories and stories, and they were the nicest, kindest people, and in the car heading back to our hotel I turned to Trey and said, “I want to live next door to them!” on two consecutive nights with two different couples.

I expected to feel, in San Francisco, the way you feel when you try to sleep on what is always your partner’s side of the bed, or when, right-handed, someone dares you to sign your name with your left. But I didn’t feel that way. And when we landed at LaGuardia, the skyline that has always been an irreducible prime, the wellspring of yes I am home now this is where I belong occasioned nothing inside: the same nothing as when you know a relationship is over, all coupling mere thinking of England, biding time until after that movie opens, after the family function, after a bottle of bourbon to make formal what you have known for far too long.

Despite being each other’s daemon familiars, each other’s hearts, Trey has been ready to leave New York for a long time. I didn’t feel quite this way until the plane touched down, just how ripe I am to clasp his hands and finally go –

So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.