Turns out Seb got on the wrong plane and ended up in Chicago.
When I got to the airport yesterday morning, I found him wandering the halls looking dazed.
We sped home, pointing out this and that and all the while the most surreal part was me driving.
The car felt right again, after the unfamiliar handling of the night before.
I was driving in Montreal. I remembered the Dorval circle, remembered where to cut into what lane, that little burst of speed after cutting onto the highway felt just right and all too familiar.
Then there was yesterday.
Lunch, and a hundred phone calls, only nobody answered, no one was home... The cold creeping in with the thought that maybe I had been lost to Montreal after all.
We popped by Dan and Nancy's to drop off presents and say hi to Vincent.
His grin could have swallowed the entire world as he jumped in my arms and bowled me over the couch as though nothing had changed in eight months.
We laughed and giggled and tickle-fought and smoked a joint in the basement and talked of matter transporters and NASA and brilliant thrilling things.
Nancy hugged me in tears and begged me to come back into her life and suddenly I wanted to so badly.
Everyone's been so wonderful, so respectful of my wanderlust, of my terrible need to swallow more of said world before being able to feel comfortable in it.
Letting me figure it out on my own.
David, Steven, John, the closest dearest ones, who made it clear that I was missed but that they would never beg me to return.
Nancy did. In tears. "I need you", she said.
Vincent crawled into my lap and burbled his assent.
Something turned over in my heart as we sped for David's place, grabbed him and his rollerblades and headed for the old port.
More pangs of loss as we reached the Atwater market, it's changed so much, so many renovations, parking lots and dirt in all the wrong places.
We strapped in and rolled for all of ten minutes before the drizzle hit.
Plan B was Star Wars, and we grabbed tickets, ate smoked meat, bought postcards for Cristal, and saw the flick.
I was thrilled to find that I loved it, the culmination of all my Star Wars dreams hitting me hard in the sternum when Yoda kicked butt.
I've always wanted to see him in action.
Beaver tails and a walk in the old port, and we dropped David off at home, my heart thrilled that we'd spent such a wonderful day together.
Happy, just so incredibly happy that the giggles were still there, that the threshold has been passed and he is still a great fiery beacon of warmth to me in this cold universe.
Parking outside Fouf's, just me and Seb, my head still swimming in happy we waded in through a crowd bigger than it's been in years, and suddenly all the stares I was getting weren't the tattoos (they were covered), the vynil, the fact that I was dressed tougher and harder than most.
This time the stares were the plain sweater, the normal jeans, the lack of spikes and leather beside the usual crew of beautiful misfits.
But when the boys arrived, none of it mattered.
I saw them from the door, and ran outside to greet them.
And everything after that was a blur of tears.
I cried into Marc's shoulder, and Cfoo's, and Eric stroked my hair with a tenderness that added a scent to the wind that I'd forgotten could exist.
Oh gods, what have I done...
Suddenly I remembered every diary entry from after gaming or foufs nights or hanging out with the boys nights a year ago, the warmth, the sheer thrill that comes from being in the company of so many uber-people all at once and having them want me, ME, among them.
So when Eric turned to me and said "Please come back, I need you" and then Clayton took me aside and said "Please come back, Montreal needs you" and when Marc pulled me in for another hug, oh gods, the sort of hug I'd managed to forget existed in the cold un-tactile world of Paree...
And when we spoke of brilliant things and titanium chips and benchmarking SSL calculations and I suddenly felt my brain lurch into movement after so many months of holding it in check and using it to grind out documentation for banks...
And when I told him how much I hate this or that about my company, and he announced that I should just come back then and do something spectacular here...
...that they were still trying to change the world and needed me amongst the ranks.
Me.
This means so much. Changing the world. A dream I thought I'd lost, abandoned, given up to mundanity, to after-work beers and learning housecleaning.
I haven't lost it, and somehow, it's stronger than the wanderlust.
Oh gods, oh gods.
Dropping him off, I thought of the day I realized I'd been accepted as one of the guys, and how it was one of the greatest of my accomplishments -- finding true friends, people I could easily, honestly, without any doubts, look up to and love unconditionally for their fire and purpose...
And I left them to wander the world, thinking I had no home.
I'm such an idiot. What a jerk. Fuck.
Marc hugged me outside his place, a familiar scene, and while the kids waited in the car for us to say our goodbyes, turned to me and said "Please come back, I need you."
I drove to Eric's place with tears blurring the streets, my knuckles white and my palms dented from the steering wheel.
At Eric's, we curled up to watch "Spriggan", Seb passing out almost instantly, and Val and Clayton curling up beside me on the couch, Val stroking my fingers and paying me impossible compliments, Clayton shifting his shoulder once and all of a sudden I was in the warmest place in the world, more comfortable than I've been in months, and happier, so much happier, simply, purely, brilliantly bright flaming white happy...
Just from the contact. The warmth of the familiar body, pure affection, no stress, no pressure, sheer friendship the sort I'd never believed I would ever know.
I slept through the entire movie, sacrilege for such a great flick, but that hour's sleep was better and warmer than any sleep I've had in the past year, save for the moments curling up in David's perfect crevasses.
Can you tell that I'm lost in the memories that this diary holds? The past few years have been filled with so much wonder...
And I took it for granted.
I drove everyone home, just like way back, hugged each one at each stop, Ollie and Val and then Seb slept through the rest of the ride and I was so glad, so glad...
...that he couldn't see me crying.
I'm not explaining any of this right, the language isn't powerful enough for this intensity, to describe the bonheur, the beast moving within my ribs at being told I'm needed.
And at finding dreams that I'd misplaced in the race to grow up and get normal.
Oh gods, I know that, intellectually I do, intellectually I know the pain I've caused David with my distance, know how much Steven resists from asking me to return in his impossible respectfulness.
But...
Oh, I don't know, fuck.
I don't know.
There are so many ghosts still in these streets, passing streetcorners and remembering bloodshed and pain and drugs and deals going down and this or that squeegee kid bringing back too many visions, making me want to run again, to run away from the city in which all this pain hurricaned through my head for so many empty years.
In Paris, everytime I let myself miss my boys and wonder if I would be happier with them, I chase away the thought and part of that chasing away is this selfish, childish, puerile need to be greater than that, not to be someone born in a town who spends their entire lives in that town, eats, breathes, procreates, and passes time until they die.
And what's the real motivation behind that thought?
I'm still running away from high school. I still want to be better than the kids I went to school with. I want them to notice me missing in those streets and realize that the little fuckwit they all said would never get anywhere was suddenly soaring far above them.
And I know that's not right. Not real wanderlust. Not real thirst for knowledge, experiences, to push as far across the universe as is humanly possible.
David, what you said in the theatre stuck in my head, but you're only partly right.
I don't think the wanderlust is genetic, I think it's environmental.
I'm not trying to change the world by speeding across it, I'm still trying to run away.
Run away.
Somewhere inside my head I'm still a pathetic little girl that wants her ego appeased, that wants to stick it to the kids from high school.
I thought I'd grown out of that.
It's a hard thing to admit aloud.
But not as hard as having Marc kiss me affectionately on the forehead for the first time in my and his life, and realizing that it's not a gift, but a measure of the pain I've caused him by running away.
There are still so many stresses here, too many people to call, too many people wanting to make plans and the usual rising panic at not wanting to disappoint them, the subject of so many diary entries of the years previous.
There were a lot of stresses here, they haven't disappeared.
But what I'd completely forgotten was that they were worth it.
And last night, the proudest man in the world, kissed me on the forehead and told me he needed me.
I'm such an asshole.
Shit.
I'm crying again, the tears bigger than the fingernails that Val stroked so tenderly last night.
It hurts, oh gods it hurts, this confusion, I don't understand I don't understand...
I'm such a jerk. Oh fuck...
And there's so much I'm forgetting, so many moments of yesterday, this or that vision, the slant of light from David's smile, the fact that the main reason I was having trouble not smoking in Montreal is gone - Marc and Cfoo quit and suddenly there was no one smoking into my beer making me want to bum smokes.
So many other things, a billion moments, so much in just one day, twenty waking hours, just the way it should be. Impossible to write about. TOo much, too full, the fullness I've been looking for, to pass days too rife with LIVING to be able to recount every moment, to live life to the fullest, really, is what I mean to say...
It happens here too. GOds, I'd forgotten even that.
Shit.
The pangs of pain behind my eyes are realization that I stopped writing poetry when I left Montreal, that I haven't dreamed of changing the world since I got on that plane, that I haven't felt loved or needed and haven't swung a giggling child and taught him something significant.
Clayton ordered me to have children yesterday, to counteract the white-trash effect. To keep the world from turning into a "trailer park hurtling across the sky" as Justin had once put it.
There was something important in there too, significant, but I've lost it to the tears, overwhelmed.
I can't handle this. TOo much too much, oh gods I'm drowning.
I can't stay here so near to my family, everytime my mother looks at me I want to run for the airport.
And I can't leave because I have a real family here, Clayton and Marc and Eric and Lucky and David and Steven and they are worth more than any pride in the world, more than any career, more than sticking it to my high school bastards.
I can't believe I overlooked that.
I needed Paris to teach me certain things under duress, to force me into building a home and learning hospitality, to learn to sing and respect my body and develop a more active lifestyle - things that my bloated social life in Montreal made so difficult to keep focus on.
I needed Paris to teach me the lessons that I thought were missing from modern American life, so that I can hold them in my heart and carry them with me.
I needed Europe and train rides into every country to satisfy my pathetic pride and need to do things with Big Fancy Names
And it gave me all of that, wrapped in bows and glistening with all the right words, trying to make me forget love.
It almost worked.
And now I'm alone, fluttering in between continents, still in love, confused, in pain, and utterly unsure of where to go.
All because I was seduced by fancy things, and then the spell was broken with a few simple words, and warm arms.
Simple words. Like fields of grass on a spring day, a thousand times more wonderful than any uber-hip bar in Paree.
And I knew that. I just wasn't listening.