through these glasses

madeline musings

Four days cut off from reality (for the most part) in the middle of Lake Superior with my urban tribe was supposed to be break from reality. Madeline Island is quickly becoming my favorite midwest location. It has great forests, beautiful beaches, the opportunity to go sailing on the closest thing we have to the ocean, and a fun little picture postcard downtown. What it doesn't offer is a lot to do when it rains. ...and this weekend it rained. and rained. and rained... instead of coming home refreshed, I'm feeling a bit broken. I'm not built to have as much solitude and quiet time as I do on a daily basis, but I'm apparently not wired for so much togetherness either.

We didn't really have a contingency plan for a rain day. We certainly didn't plan on it raining the whole time we were there. Someone once said there is no such thing as bad weather, only wrong clothing choices. I'd anticipated cold (thank you polar fleece), but not wet. Luckily, on afternoon #1, it was just a light rain. Two of us broke from the group to check out the stores and found $2 rain ponchos at store #2. You know you're a) a tourist and b) intent on shopping when you don a modified clear plastic garbage bag to waltz around town in.

One of my goals, however, was to secure a pile of rocks from the beach, give voice to all of the angst that's rumbling up in me by writing each thing down on one of the rocks, and then throwing them back into the surf. I got a third of the way there. Roommate 2.0 and I braved the driving wind and pellets of frigid rain to trek to the beach (thank you Big Ten for having a wind/rain repellant, hooded jacket with that I could abscond with for the afternoon!) where I filled my pockets with rocks. Tomorrow night, I have a date with my angst, those rocks and a sharpie. After that, I'm throwing them in the Mississippi. Maybe flowing water is a better option for ridding myself of them anyways.

roommate 4.0 arrives

Last night the new roomie offered to take me out to dinner as thanks for letting him move in. One would argue that his monthly rent check should be thanks enough, but who am I to pass up free sushi? If there is a better way to decompress after a hectic week (month) of reorganizing the house with an eye to giving away all the useable stuff I no longer need/use and prepping for company (8 days! eight. long. and probably all too short days...), it's a seat at nami's sushi bar and a good beer. throw in good conversation with 4.0, who I am still getting to know, and we call the evening a raging success. ...even if I didn't make any progress on the pile of stuff that still needs to be sorted/files/shredded/pitched on the coffee table back home. any bets on how long my burst of "correct" cleaning lasts before i give in and resort to the homeowner's version of a teen cleaning her room by putting everything under the bed or in a closet? I give me 5 days.

e11even days

As the good aries girl I am, I tend towards the "but why can't i have it NOW?!?! I've waited all of 5 minutes?! Isn't that enough?! Why must you torture me with your 'patience is a virtue young grasshopper' thing?!" end of the spectrum. Waiting and I? We are decidely not BFFs. at all....

and yet...

I'd settled into the waiting. In point of fact, I've spent the better part of the last 24 years waiting. waiting for the next potential visit, the next trip planning session, the next itinerary, the next flight, the next meeting, the next finding our way back to each other, the next rollicking good time (or, on occasion, out of sync time) and the next good bye. lather. rinse. repeat. It takes me a bit to sink back into my old familiar life, but no matter how much I have despaired, it has always come. That moment where the scale tips and I want to live here more than I want to live there. (sometimes it takes longer than others. It can happen within three days of arriving home. or three months.) and so I resign myself to eventually putting danish me back up on a shelf until the next time because all in all, I have a great life here. I love my work, my neighborhood, my friends, my life. 

and yet...

he's not here. he's there. so very much else is there too, but that stuff can't announce in the middle of a conversation where I jokingly try to come to terms with the fact that we won't see each other for another year or so that he was thinking more like September. of 2008.

I jokingly send a few links to ticket search results to either inject some reality into the situation (or perhaps call his bluff). the only thing a fire sign hates more than waiting is disappointment. I think he's kidding, and I can only go on with the pretend travel hoping for so long before I must nip it in the bud, lest it so take control of my innerds that it jumbles them all around. It's not practical to walk around with my stomach in my throat, my heart on my sleeve and my lungs squished behind the large sphynx moths imprisoned in my ribcage.

but he's not.

He's so not kidding that daily monitoring of flight prices becomes a reality. And not in the "oh, what if we play around with these two purely hypothetical dates and see how much it would be" way either. He gives hard and fast arrival and departure dates. Of course, both being freelance, they adjust around deadlines, and shift more than once. And then a deadline falls that can't be adjusted, so we work around it, and lengthen the stay parameters instead of shorten them. and then one morning late last week, I wake to find a new message. a forwarded copy of an actual honest to goodness booked itinerary.

oh. my. freaking. gawd.

I told the universe when I came home in july that I'd really like some sort of help in untangling my "live here, live there" quandry. some help in figuring out if we really are that compatible, or if it's just a figment of my overactive imagination. On more than one occasion, I mused out loud that I'd really like some way to know if we were also compatible on my side of the atlantic. in my real life. with my larger than life friends.

It never occured to me to ask him to come here.

now.

yet in eleven days, I'll be picking him up at the ariport.

please universe, let's not file this under "be careful what you wish for" m'kay?