I’m coming home, via Sacramento
In the past couple of weeks I’ve been feeling a pull toward home. It started with a longing for San Francisco. That’s always how it starts.
Yesterday when I told a friend about my homesickness, she asked what I missed. I had no answer except that it was less like missing anything specific (I was not going to admit that celebrity gossip rags and the E! channel would be high on that theoretical list) and more like feeling that I had done everything I came here to do. I have found what I was looking for, on many levels, and answered all the questions that have been plaguing me for years.
It’s not necessary to be here anymore but I enjoy having lots of free time to write and not working in an office. I thought I’d just stay and not make any decisions about my return since I don’t have any real reason to go home. Or rather, I didn’t.
Today there was an email in my inbox from my best friend. The subject line read: I hope you’re sitting down. We’ve been friends since we were 15. When I saw that potentially ominous subject line, moments from our lives together flashed through my head…
I saw us sitting on the steps outside our high school auditorium on the last day of school wondering what the hell that long, horrifying experience was all about. I saw us singing Madonna songs in the rain, waiting for a ride outside a tollbooth while hitchhiking through Europe. I saw us writing on the walls of the San Francisco anarchist collective house where we lived. I saw myself hiding in her house in Alaska for a month after sustaining a one-two punch of being cheated on and having another friend die. I saw us laying on the beach in Tahiti on my 31st birthday.
Over the years we did a lot of acid and drank a lot of wine and danced to a lot of 80s pop. We moaned about dreary office jobs and made zines that mocked this endlessly confusing world. We invested seventeen years in developing a shared vocabulary of life that only we speak fluently.
And now she’s going to have a baby. As I read the email, I was laughing but tears were running down my face. I couldn’t decide between the two so I let both come. My heart was pounding as I ran outside to face my mortal enemy – the Thai phone system. On this trip so far, the battle stands at 2-0 in favor of telecommunications, so I was not hopeful. But necessity has a way of weighting one’s chances and in the end I got her on the line. There was a lot of confusing chatter because what can you possibly say about something that as she pointed out is a thing – like winning the lottery or getting cancer – that only happens to other people.
What I did tell her is that I will come home mid-summer at the very latest, in plenty of time to be in Sacramento (where she lives) for the end of the pregnancy and the birth. “Really?” she asked. Oh yeah right, as if I’d miss the chance to point and laugh at her big-as-a-house misery. I’m a good friend like that.
So life made the decision for me, as it has a way of doing. I now have a firm end-date to this trip. In the meantime, I’ve already written the first in a series of letters to the baby that will document its journey into the world and will include as many embarrassing stories about mom as I can come up with. And considering our ridiculous lives, that’s gonna be a lot.
Tags: Nong Khai, Thailand
sandra_101
Finally, I can take you to the Pancake Circus! That’s the main reason I got knocked up.
Not to be another voice of pessimism in your life but I always thought that “I’m just waiting for my life to begin” and that is what I feel when I hear people getting married, having babies, hell, even having jobs. I’m 0-3. I’m jobless. I’m single–and stupidly chasing a guy that apparently doesn’t want to be chased (at least by me). And I’m living with my parents. I’m waiting for my life to begin already….
Admit it, you’re coming back to the USA just so you can see Die Hard 4 next summer.
Duh.