THE DMBFCKS

I have always hated Comfort. It was the enemy of Adventure, I had thought. I was wrong.

My friends, the other two-thirds of the DMBFCKS, got married last weekend. I flew in for their wedding and visited their home for the first time. A Christmas tree wrapped in yellow lights greeted me as I stepped into their home. A wreath sat above the fireplace. The living room was scented with the smell of pine and warmed by the burning wood. As usual, we entered into conversation. They sat across from me, her head in his lap, as we caught each other up on our lives, laughter being the glue that connected one second to the next. My eyes took in all of the sights and I breathed in the feeling. I breathed it all in. Comfort. For once in a long time, I did not grimace at the word.

Here was a Comfort that was earned, one built as a refuge for a love they bet their lives on despite the uncertainty and discomfort. Here was a Comfort they had worked so hard in achieving, a Comfort they had only dreamed of as they were separated by many impossibilities. The Comfort in front of me, even in its stillest moments, will always be a passionate love that burns of Adventure because Adventure is what it was founded on.

It reminded me of a flame I had once lit for a past Adventure. But that flame, that old Comfort I had, betrayed me. I grew bitter and accused Comfort of being a lie, a fraud. “Never again,” I declared, blowing out the flame I once cared for.

Since then, I have offered Adventure without Comfort to every girl that I liked. Outrunning daybreak in Barcelona, splashing water in the Seine under Parisian skies, hiding from the sun on the Upper West Side during a New York summer, promises of endless travel through exotic Asian landscapes, the list goes on. But by banishing Comfort from my life, I had doomed myself of any genuine chance at Love. Even the greatest of adventures require rest and peace. Even Ulysses needed to get home. Adventure without Comfort is like traveling the world without a place to sleep. You grow tired after a while. And surely enough, they did too.

So Comfort, I want you back in my life. No longer do I want a home designed to be vacated. No longer do I want to seek experiences destined to explode into a million little fragments of irreparable memories. Rather, I want a love like my two friends, far from boring, full of Adventure and yet proudly comfortable. I want to put up a Christmas tree with a lover and sit by the fire with hot cocoa warming our insides on a chilly, winter’s day, her head on my lap, trusting I won’t fall out from under her at any time. I want to build a place of refuge for after Adventures and before the next Adventure takes us on our way. I want peace. I want love. I want Comfort.

I gave him my Canadian passport. I was originally in the non-EU citizen line but there was no customs officer working there so I got moved to the EU line. He glanced at my passport, flipped it open to a page, stamped it, smiled and said, “Bienvenidos!”

“I don’t think he actually checked my passport,” I told Jon. “He just stamped it without even checking if it was me in the picture.”

“You got a stamp? He didn’t even give me a stamp,” chuckled Jon. Then he frowned. “Aw man, I want a stamp. Should I go back and ask him for it?”

We went to get SIM cards for our iPhones. We asked one person after another, gesticulating more than speaking, to find out where to get them. Slowly we gathered that Lebara Mobile, the mobile carrier, sold SIM cards at these little stands by the bank inside the terminal but we first had to pay at the convenience store around the corner. It was all very confusing.

While the lady at the Lebara stand were setting up our phones, I did a three sixty-degree spin and observed the sights around. It was a fairly empty airport. Its interior was rather dilapidated. The colors were faded, the paints grown ashen. Having been to the world’s most modern airports such as Singapore’s Changi airport or Dubai International airport, I would’ve considered Barcelona’s El Prat airport to be one that was past its prime. And yet there was something about the sights I was observing. They seemed to observe me. They were looking at me. They seemed to snicker, not giving one shit about what I thought of them. There was nothing to prove. There was a feeling of pride about the place.

“Where are you guys from?” asked the man at the stand who was supervising the lady setting up our phones.

As Jon answered him, I saw a girl from the corner of my eye walk past us towards the bank ATM. I turned my head to follow her slow step and watched her get in line. She had a pair of Urban Ears headphones around her ears and wore a pair of green Nikes. Her eyes were glassy, closed to the world. There was a mystique about her. I wanted her to look up so I could catch a better glance at her. She walked up to the ATM. I saw the outlines of her face as she pressed in her passcode, withdrew some money, and turned back in my direction. She walked by us again. I wondered what music she was listening to.

“Where are you from?” asked the man again, directing his voice towards me.

I laughed. “That question is hard to answer.”

He looked at me with a knowing look. “Then let me ask another. Where are you going?”