One pair of shoes

There is one pair of shoes outside my door tonight.

From two days ago, there were two beds, two sets of towels, two piles of messy clothes, shared shampoo and toothpaste and ginger snaps and apples. There were two heads propped up on pillows laughing and talking until 4 am; there were discussions about serious things like love and life and less serious things like boys and the SNL version of American politics. There was me, sick and unable to move on Thanksgiving day and there was you, laying with me, talking with me, getting juice and crackers for me. There was me being carried by you. All things shared by your girlfriends.

I waved goodbye from the platform of the train station this morning. It was raining. It always rains when I say goodbye. Maybe God just knows. Goodbyes are always hard, and as much as I'd like to think that they get easier they don't. When a friend comes to visit, it's this beautiful insertion. But God's grace sustains and I make it to now. Life restarts and work resumes.

There is one pair of shoes outside my room tonight, and I smiled as I noticed. Thank you for this weekend Janice.

Berne

It's been an incredible week and a half - incredible in the very literal sense of not being credible, of being beyond belief.

Sitting on the train going back to Geneva, Kareen and I passed by such peaceful mountains. Different from the Rockies but still beautiful. For like all things on the Continent, in the old world, there is a veneer of faded beauty. These rocks do not have the untouched majesty of the Canadian wild; they are viable - existing in perfect symbiosis with the people who day-in and day-out make their way up and down those hilly steps. I like this picture. In some weird way, it captures both the inside of the moving train and the steadfast wilderness outside; humans superimposed on nature. I guess that's how it's always been.

I learned a lot this week and weekend; there was so much emotional expenditure. All of me feels exhausted and I long for a rest that is put on delay. Even these words, this entry, cannot help untie the knot within; words do not even exist in me. At least, not yet. In their nascent form, perhaps they will remain ineffable. Memories held in my mind.

This week and weekend, so many successive events took place in parallel. Before one (anyone) could share, another event happened, and another, and another. Some of it is documented, some of it witnessed - in an email exchange in an airport in Geneva, in an upstairs apartment in the West end of New York, in voice last night. The process. The reflection. The witness. The life of someone special past. How does one even begin to make sense of all the lessons learned, to peel back each layer - layers which piled one on top of the other so quick that you could not understand? All you can feel is that you've aged, immeasurably. Within a week and a half, you've aged and they've aged. And you don't know how you got here.