I'm still a romantic.

3 p.m., March 3, 2010.  Tampa, FL.  During the Gorillaz Plastic Beach First Listen on NPR.



At some point, the raucous night turned into a hazy morning, but i never saw it happen; at some point i'd gone from a lovely drunk to a very heavy sober.  But I never saw that happen, either.  I just remember suddenly being very aware of everything happening around me with a clarity that I'd not had for the whole evening.  For the whole month.

I drank another vodka cran in a feeble attempt to extend my last night in Cairns, but apparently being drunk was not written in my fate for the evening, and I remained sober through the liquor.

I danced with C and we walked back to our hotel, where we went to our separate rooms and i began packing a month's worth of travel gear.  Did i sleep?... i don't think so. I just packed and thought.  And almost robotically, intuitively, walked back to C's room with only 30 minutes to spare before the early morning bus to the airport departed.

He opened the door and we embraced and i told him that i'd miss him terribly and that i wished i could skip another week of work and travel with him to New Zealand.

Then he asked if we could have sex and i told him i thought he'd never ask, so we did, and it was beautiful and passionate and i came very close to crying but i didn't because i had to leave to catch my bus and also because i still wasn't able to quantify (or qualify!) C's feelings for me, so i didn't want my tears to overstep the undefined boundaries set in place by travelling lovers.  So instead of crying, i made some cutesy, sassy remark like, "Quick and dirty; just how i like it."  And he laughed and so did i, despite the rather desperate feeling inside my chest. And then he said, "Wait, I wrote you something," and he got up from the bed to look in his bags and i thought to myself that his body was maybe the loveliest body that i'd had the pleasure of being naked with. And then he turned around with a piece of notepaper that had been several-times folded, pressed it into my hand, and asked me to read it on the airplane. And my heart melted and i wanted to stay, oh how i wanted to stay. What a foolish thing to want!  To want to stay.  What would I have done?

And then it was morning; it was most certainly morning, and my bus was waiting, and my trans-Pacific airplane was waiting, and my friends and American life were all waiting, waiting expectantly. But oh I wanted to push them aside and lie down on the banks of the watering hole, and try my hand at the boomerang again, and fall asleep once more under the blanket of stars in the Outback.

I'm inconsistent,
M

But instead i stood up, i fought my weak knees and stood up and put on my clothes and gathered my things and left.

And from the bus windows i watched Eu cry, and behind her, I saw C appear in the soft morning shadows, and i thought to myself... Where am I?

              ...Where am I?