Home, Now

Jessica bothered me a few days after I got back about updating this blog, posting one last final entry. It feels so long ago now but I haven't even been home a week yet. I feel like the last three months were a part of some stupidly long dream that I've only just woken awake from -- but that I'm awake now, and like any dream all the details are slipping away like sand dissolving beneath a wave.

The last leg of my journey was the most stressful. In London, the only thing we really did was walk around to shop for souvenirs. Andreina was nice enough to buy a present for most people, while I only got myself a set of matching mugs that we two would have together and a neat London hat. The timing of my arrival to Boston and subsequent departure to Denver was really, really tricky -- just about an hour and ten minutes by the schedule, with that time needing to be sufficient to land, get through customs, get through security again, and arrive at my gate before the next flight took off. On our last night in London, we packed up nearly everything we could possibly need and then loaded Andreina up with as much as possible, trying to keep my backpack as ridiculously light as I could manage. I hoped that, with a freakishly light backpack, the time through customs and security would be drastically reduced.

We settled into bed at a little past ten, both of us more anxious than anything to just see the last few hours pass by before we'd head out to our planes. I couldn't sleep at all. I tossed and turned, feeling itchy and excited and also very stressed (about the connections, about getting our tickets to Denver somehow printed up in the morning, about Lucas). Before I knew it, it was 2am, which was 9pm Boston time, in the 24-hour check-in time for our Denver flight. I checked up in and went back to tossing and turning. The itching sensation got worse and worse...and then I found a bug crawling on the back of my neck!

Freaked out, I sat up in bed with my knees curled up under my chin. The only light in the room was a faint glow from the exit sign that lit up one corner of my mattress. I sat still for a bit and then lay back down, wondering if it had been a freak occurrence. Now I felt doubly itchy all over and I was sure I was just imagining it all until I spotted, by the faint glow, another bug crawling on the far side of the mattress.

I got up and moved to the bed above Andreina's, feeling sick and itchy and nervous and stressed. It was almost 4am by that point and I managed to drift back to sleep. My alarm went off at 6:30. I woke Andreina up and after we were dressed, we went downstairs only to be told the lobby didn't open until 7:30. We hung up near our rooms again and just counted the minutes down until we could get back into the lobby and beg them to let us use their printers to get our Denver boarding passes.

Before I knew it, we'd checked out of the hostel and made it to the London Underground. I left Andreina a few stations down; she only had to ride the subway to the end to get to her airport but I had to make a few changes and then catch a suburban train to get to the Gatwick airport.

The next few hours for me were full of gut-wrenching stress as I worried more and more about the connection flight, about what would happen if I missed the plane, about having to buy yet another ticket and wait another day to get home. My flight out of London had a layover in Iceland and the flight out of Iceland was late by about five minutes, five minutes that seemed like years to my worried brain. I felt on the verge of puking from pure panic when, just as we arrived in Boston air space, the pilot came over the intercom and informed us we were in a holding pattern until traffic on the ground cleared up.

My flight to Denver was scheduled to depart at 9:20pm; my flight landing in Boston didn't touch ground until 8:20pm. I was a nervous wreck. As soon as I could, I had my phone on. The first call I made on it these last three months was to Andreina -- I was going to beg her to make a scene, beg the flight attendants, do whatever she had to do to give me the time I needed to get to that gate.

And....our flight had been delayed by 20 glorious minutes!

Andreina, understandably, was in a rotten mood: she'd been waiting in the airport for some 8 hours and was looking at the prospect of a new, unhappy delay to her final departure to Denver. As for me, though, I was ecstatic! I was singing and happy and prancing through the airport, much to Andreina's deep displeasure. At one point, when she started practically cursing out our airline, swearing she'd never fly BlueJet ever again in her life, I made the point that it was probably the terrible storm outside that was to blame and not the airline. She growled at me, told me "Whatever," and stalked off to stand in another part of the waiting area to get away from me.

Our flight ended up being delayed by nearly a full hour and instead of arriving in Denver at 11:45pm, we got there at 12:30am. Andreina, at this point, did a 180-degree attitude turn and suddenly became happy-go-lucky, smiling at everyone and everything. Mami and Allie were waiting for us at the exit from the terminal concourse and had nothing but huge smiles and hugs for us. And, walking up from where he'd been waiting by the baggage claim, Lucas was there. And he was just about as perfect as I could picture him.

This last week has been a mental rush. After getting back early, early on Tuesday morning, Lucas and I drove up to Boulder for my first day of orientation. We sat through classes about how to get help from the professors and academic expectations, and got lunch at a pizza shop that served honey for a crust-dipping sauce. I had orientation until 6pm on Tuesday, and then until 5pm on Wednesday and Thursday with some last minute paperwork on Friday. All day yesterday was moving day; I don't have very much to move at all, but there was long lengths of road to cover and some misinformation on meeting times between me and the lady selling me a dresser, losing us about an hour of move time. Lucas put in his two-week notice at work on Friday, giving DISH exactly two years of his life. Until those two weeks are up, he's staying in Denver so I sit alone now in this Boulder apartment. It's very cute and comfy with a magnificent deck. It's so quiet and empty now, aside from the ridiculously loud exhaust fan in the ceiling that I have serious doubts about. It's nearing 9pm and I go to my first class in less than 12 hours. It's so hard to believe that a week ago, I was in London sleeping in a bug-ridden hostel bed, having just gotten there from Paris, after having been in Strasbourg, Dijon, Lyon, Nice...

I feel like I've just finished some amazing and frighteningly fast roller coaster ride, and the ride has just finished its last loop and is now slowing down for a smooth ride back to its home. My hair is all frizzy, my breathing is still uneven and fast with an occasional hitch, and my hands are shaking, but already the adrenaline is beginning to subside and my heart is beginning to slow and the ride itself, no matter how recent and exhilarating, is beginning to settle in as a fading memory.