There's a miniature redhead blowing bubbles beside me and the QWERTY keyboard is lurching underneath my fingers.
The charming psychiatrist on the seven hour flight, touching my shoulder with every other word and insisting on carrying my luggage for me.
Magnificent blonde he said.
All that was gone from the forefront of any thought or argument I might have offered the moment I glimpsed David's buzz-cropped hair, the smile I've knitted so many justifications about.
For thirteen thrumming seconds my vision was a cheesy seventies special effect, the world around his face fading into white, leaving a perfect cutout circle, hightlighted by the sudden utter arrest of the heart I'd thought I'd crushed to a fine powder so many times before.
You should have seen the way he looked at me.
The impossible way his grin stretched to swallow his face, the cutout circle, and then the airport entirely...
The drive to Ottawa to pick up the girls, the incredibly wide horizon, the light pollution hazing up a sky that I've grozn accustomed to seeing pitch black and empty, not the romantic purple of Friday night on a brush-and-pine lined highway.
The stars were stars I spent so many evenings staring up at this summer.
The theatre that we watched "Monsters Inc." (finally an american flick that understands monstres and monsters) in and the streets we drove in an all-too-familiar car through, and the all-too-perfect wake-up with tzo redheads giggling gleefully and crawling between our arms.
Too perfect.
I haven't even seen the rest of the loved ones who've left cookie cutter holes in my heart, and I'm torn again.
The streets are too wide, too filthy, too american, the buildings too flat, the cars so big that their stench is visible.
The food is different, flavourless, the wine too bitter, the coffee sour...
The air is greasy with dirt and unpleasantness, and through all of it...
...my heart is full to breaking.
I am looking so hard for home that I am killing my brain with it.
This continents reeks of poor quality and great quantities, and yet there are so many things that are still too perfect to let go without dying.