Recalculating

“Things were feeling tenuous this morning, but I’m kind of holding it together.”
— my journal, 15 April 2014. Tenuous? Really?

When I left for Denver I was halfway through the trip and halfway through my little notebook. It’s possible that at that point I still didn’t really know what time it is. I hadn’t managed to get more than one night of sleep at a time, and those were rare enough. No wonder I felt like I was hanging on by my fingernails.

Deciding to take a day trip to see Molly was the best idea ever. We hadn’t really talked since we were teenagers; I went to her wedding but as anyone who’s had a wedding knows, you don’t get to indulge in lengthy conversations during those. I put myself on the first IAD-DEN flight out and booked for the last one back, and reconnected with someone I spent pretty much every weekend with for years. She picked me up from the airport, we went to brunch, and we worked through the initial awkwardness. In a way we were meeting for the first time. Again.

After that it became awesome.

We went down to a sort of hip area of Denver, walked around and went to a yarn shop and looked at thrift stores. We tried on shoes…which is funny because we two are the least girly girls on the planet. We hit her favourite vegan food store. After a little more walking around she floated the idea of just sitting down somewhere and talking, and we hit on the question that pretty much anyone has to make at that point in the afternoon: coffee or booze?

I’m a coffee person…but I knew she liked cocktails. So we ended up in a bar, having cocktails and talking about life. We talked about family (hers and mine), writing, my new job, feminist issues in Disney and Pixar movies etc, etc, etc… The afternoon sped by, both of us less and less concerned about the things we needed to get back or attend to, until reality turned up in the form of flight schedules. I did need to get to the airport at some stage.

We left the bar later than we should have. Then the satnav decided it was going to be strange and confusing.

When you miss an instruction from a modern GPS satellite navigator it automatically redraws the route, and if you have the voice commands turned on it’ll tell you “Recalculating…” as it tries to figure out how to unfuck your journey. It gives you a little time to think about your poor life choices before sending you on your way.

Molly, burdened with the responsibility of not just driving safely but also getting me to the airport on time, relied on the satnav rather than her own perceptions. As we wove through the back streets of Denver I started to wonder about the satnav’s perceptions, though. We’d be three blocks away from Colfax, where we were instructed to turn right…then before we got to the street the satnav would say “Recalculating…” This made me a little concerned, especially when we ended up driving around the wilds of the city with no real understanding of what we were doing or how we were going to get where we were going.

When one is within two hours of takeoff from an airport that is on the other side of the city…and it’s rush hour on a Tuesday…one might be tempted to start freaking out. Molly kind of did, on my behalf. It was good of her, but I’d already come entirely unravelled during the Longest Night in SFO. I knew that the consequences of missing this flight would be annoying but not life-threatening. It would seriously mess up the week’s timetable; Beaufort, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh would all tumble to the ground like a house of cards. All my plans would shatter.

Again.

One of the nice things about “again” is that I’d been there and done that and survived. I somehow managed to recalculate when I didn’t get where I was going. I didn’t hit all the places I’d planned to hit, I had to cancel some reservations, and some thing ended up looking very different from how I’d planned, but nothing was ever ruined.

Losing my shit in SFO was a problem, but I got pulled out of that with a minimum of damage done. That wasn’t going to happen here; I had people I could stay with in Denver and I knew I’d be able to get myself on a flight out, to somewhere, at some stage. Worse things had already happened on this trip, and I survived them. I sprinted through Logan airport and begged my way through security to get on a flight I probably shouldn’t have been on in the first place, all while nearly delirious with sleep deprivation. Spending a night in Colorado drinking with my best friend from childhood would hardly be a disaster.

Of course, we made it to DEN with plenty of time to spare. I even had time to get a postcard, something I hadn’t managed through the entire weekend in Baltimore. Once again Denver came through for me and was made entirely of win. If I got nothing else out of this month of madness, reconnecting with one of my oldest friends was good enough to justify the entire thing.