let's get mildly suggestive

I will miss structure the most, waking up with a purpose. This habit of waking up somewhere different each day, seeing the same familiar people around you, choosing an outfit from a handful of options, and then swim at a sea of kind strangers, polishing and nourishing your your ego. Then some well rehearsed lines and some spontaneous banter, a fun sequence of funny and deep. Oh and food. Very good food, new options every day, fulfilling even the strangest of cravings, tying the entire day in a nice delicious ribbon. Most importantly, all of these and more, with him. With the person I desperately wanted to be and the person I so desperately want to be with.

My sense of what home is lives in a dark corner on my mind I rarely visit. There’s a history of inexplicable loneliness and an all consuming fear that goes hand in hand with this vague idea of home. I’ve tried to understand it and maybe smile to it, as it manifests in new ways, inspired by this crazy life I lead. Home used to mean shouting, isolation, a suffocating sense of duty to make everything seem alright again, and loads and loads of shame. Shame for who I am, shame for who I wish I was, shame for who I want to be. It took a lot of long conversations, oceans of tears and two tireless hands always holding me tight, lulling me into a sense of security, to break, a step at a time, this circle of shame.

Then I saw that home meant comfort. Not necessarily in the “I feel comforted here” way, even though he always strived for that, but always in the “I’m comfortable being here, just being” way. My guard took an awfully long time to lower, and I’m sure there’s a lot left, a lot to be desired. But when it’s just us, in the comfort of a remote space, even when it’s just us behind a closed door, I’m home.

My home is fingers touching, it’s a thigh sitting close to mine in a big full room, it’s checking in with me when i distance myself, it’s a cup of tea I desperately needed and still didn’t have to ask for. It’s those gorgeous full lips dancing with mine, it’s the effortless choreography of our bodies underneath unraveled sheets, it’s a four letter word that found a meaning for the first time at a train station.

We’re traveling so much these days, and our schedule is hectic. There’s always stuff to get done, long checklists awaiting, people saying “Go go go!” at various tones at various times of the day. And we go, and we do and we run, and it’s glorious and it’s chaotic and it’s fun. Each city means new adventures, new faces, new reasons to be grateful for and fresh validation. It’s strange and amazing that we get to do this. See the world, see the people, experience the excitement and get excited all over again. It is so much more than a job. It is a life changing experience most people will never get to live, let alone live twice. To some extent, I’m two different people living each of the tours, with an extra bonus of experience that I may have inherited. I feel like such a stranger to the tatinof Dan. I understand him now, and if I’m honest I do so much better than himself, even as he was doing all these things I know he did. His motives were different, his goals were different, his relationship with himself was different. One thing was mostly the same, though. His idea of home. Home was a person. Home was his person, Phil.

It feels a bit silly, all this introspection, coming from the back seat of a car, in our second to last tour destination. He’s finally asleep, leaning on my shoulder, and this closeness makes everything I’m writing about fall into place. It’s this invisible bubble that has room only for too, and envelops us with care. It’s not that special of a scene. It’s us, sitting impossibly close, dozing off at the back seat, another one of these nights we spend driving, soon to be awake again, but in a different location. All these cities we’re leaving behind, some of them to never be seen again. All these cities we slept through and we’ll never even know the names of. All these cities we visited for just a handful of hours, only to leave behind again. Geography working its tireless reality around us, while we’re just drawing straight lines on new maps.