4:45 a.m.: Alarm goes off. I dress for success in black pants, a United Federation of Planets T-shirt and my black, Vash the Stampede-model trench coat. Haul my ass down the shadowed blocks to the bus stop. The luggage cart I’m dragging beside me sounds inordinately loud as its wheels scrap over the deserted, pre-dawn sidewalk. I feel exposed every time I step into the streetlights. Nicotine and endorphins clear the cobwebs from my head. After three months of Fear, Loathing and Insecurity I’m going to meet my girlfriend at the Grayhound station downtown.
5:09 a.m.: Bus arrives, crowded with early morning commuters. The man next to me is recovering from an operation. The doctors removed a nasty bit of industrial debris from the lens of his right eye. “They gave me Vicodin,” he says to the twenty-something in the red shoes sitting across from us. “But I can’t take that at work. I get all loopy.” The Man in the Red Shoes smiles, nods. “Yeah, that shit fucks you up.”My own experience with Vicodin is somewhat different. It produced none of the disassociative euphoria of, say, actual morphine, Percocet or Rush Limbaugh’s drug of choice, Oxycontin. Instead I find it gives me a brief (half-hour, tops) excitable head- and body-rush, culminating in a deep, deep crash as my metabolism adjusts to the new chemical input. I chalk this up to some strange accident of my equally strange body chemistry and do not contribute these observations to the conversation going on before me. I’m counting down minutes until my girlfriend’s arrival. And I’m watching street signs.
5:31 a.m.: Arrive at Grayhound station in the sprawling field of parking lots that is Old Town. Union Station’s blue, neon signage glares down on me from its tower. Scattered lights burn inside the fortress that is My Fair City’s main Post Office. The street is deserted. I enter through the main doors, ignoring signs that proclaim the Grayhound won’t officially open until six a.m. The light dusting of people waiting in line at the ticket counter puts a lie to this anyway.
5:41 a.m.: Wait. And wait. Seconds drag to minutes which drag to hours and seem as days. The tile floors are dirty brown, scab brown and I am waiting. Three months I’ve been without my girl, my partner, my heart, my Imzadi. She left Our Fair City on June 2nd to return to our state of origin, Missouri, and be a councilor at Girl Scout Camp. Among her many (many) loves, my girlfriend has a deep and abiding loyalty to the Scouts and all they stand for. What they are has fundamentally informed who she is and I owe them no small debt for that. My father continues to lump them in with those quasi-fascist assholes over at the Boy Scouts but, as Penn Gillette noted on his show, Bullshit, the two organizations are wholly separate entities. While the Girl Scout’s national leadership has its own set of problems (such as a creepy shift in emphasis toward twenty-first century materialism) at least they’re smart enough to remain covertly homophobic.5:45 a.m.: I’m still waiting. It’s been three months since I’ve kissed this girl, held her close and told her I loved her. I think of the Founding Fathers, particularly John Adams, who wrote whole volumes of letters to his wife, Abbey, back in Boston while he sweltered in Philadelphia at the Continental Congress. Back then, three months away from your Significant Other was (at best) the norm. Back then, the fastest means of overland transport was a good horse and prayer that the roads hadn’t turned to swamps.
A line of passengers file in through the door with the four foot numeral “3” above it. My girlfriend is not among them.
I wait more.
5:47 a.m.: Door Number Four opens and another line of haggard, travel stiffened people file in. My girlfriend is, at last, among them. She wears a voluminous, multi-colored shirt with more drape in its arms than the suit coat they buried with Biggie Smalls. Beads click between her breasts. A purple bandana holds back her hair. It rides high on her forehead, giving her the look of a cancer survivor. But I’m the smoker in the house and when I have her in my arms she feels trim and fit and wonderfully alive. We kiss beside a stack of her luggage and I don’t think because I can’t. My head is too full of her and the stunning realization that this long, fearful, hated waste of a summer is finally and completely over. At last.
We lash her luggage to the cart I’ve brought and exit through the now-operation sliding doors.
6:09 a.m.: Walk to China town. Dawn is threatening in the east. Gangstars and homeless people begin to populate the sidewalks. We make out, oblivious to them, wait ten minutes and catch our bus home.
6:31 a.m.: Arrive home. Have sex. During the post-coital conversation I try my damnedest to explain the short story I’ve just finished in somewhat interesting terms.
7:15 a.m.: Post-coital snooze.
12:30 p.m.: Wake up to find her unpacking. I stay out of her way, watching all the time for a chance to surreptitiously pinch her ass. I’ve missed that, and a million other things about her. Our nerd-tastic conversations. Our mutual love of Star Trek. Our years-old debate on the right and proper way to bring down civilization. The way she laughs at me. The way she helps me laugh at myself. Her confidence and grace, the light inside her eyes and heart, and the simple, unpretentious way she has of saying absolutely everything, even, “I love you,” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
1:30 p.m.: More sex. More conversation.
3:30 p.m.: Build book shelf in the living room.
6:17 p.m.: Sup.
7:15p.m.: Watch Ultimate Avengers. Realize I still need to write the damn thing up as I’ve completely let And You Thought It Was Safe slip through the cracks for the month of August. But watching her eat ice cream, make jokes and roll her eyes at Captain America’s straight-faced jingoisms I could care less about websites, writing or superheroes. A piece of my life has come back to me. I feel whole again, safe and secure, and all else is gravy from here on out.
9:45 p.m.: Fall asleep in girlfriend’s arms. Realize how much I’ve missed the relatively simple act of doing this.
Sometimes you have to live to write, and not the other way around.
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