Wherever you go, there you are

Wherever you go, there you are.

It’s a bitch.

And it’s a blessing.

You fly to Texas. You so desperately do not want to say goodbye to your friend, the one you must leave at the other terminal. So you don’t go to your gate. Instead you wander in your loss to the exit, and in doing so, almost miss your flight, the one that takes you away from your friend, even though --  regardless  -- she is leaving you anyway. And you can’t help but leave her too.

She must.

You must.

It goes like this.

When you run through security the second time around, you forget your vaccine in the carefully-iced-packed-belabored love of your parents, the one that is supposed to prevent you from frothing at the mouth and dying in such an embarrassing display of animal saliva in a few months time when you again must go.

And so it goes.

You barely make it.

But you do.

You arrive in the new city, the one you held out for, the other place that might fill the particularly awkward hole gaping in the dough of you. The shape for which no cookie cutter exists.

You travel around in taxis, lost on buses, whisp about on your feet in your bright new sneakers with their promises, with your new, easy companions. You mentally categorize the heat as exotic. Same goes for the urban grit and unthought-of sprawl (as if any part of it was planned).

You watch the bats flit across the light-to-dark sky with a hundred strangers on a bridge. You pet dogs whose names you do not know. You listen to free music in a new park with strangers, and your newly former-strangers.

You notice big clouds like popcorn, and popcorn shrimp, and batter-fried-anything.

You bless the green oaks and the river that curves like a scoliosis spine. You open your mouth. A lot. Food. Words. Recognition. Gasps. Air. Saliva frothing at the mouth in sleep, the undeathly kind.

You forgive everything. Anything.

You go to a party of strangers, transformed from grungy-druggy hipster-hippie by the light of the precariously placed twinkly lights hovering over the pool. You drink cups of beer and dangle your ankles in the water, your body perched just as precariously as the lights above that pardon such alchemy.

You strip off your dress and kick off your platform shoes. You cannonball into the pool and supposedly everyone cheers, although you are underwater for half of it and absorbed in your lunar nakedness for the rest of it.

A short, thin, hairy man follows you, inspired. 
No one cheers.

You go to a 24 hour diner with these new people for whom you forgive everything, even before you know what there is to forgive. Eat lemon poppy-seed pancakes bathed in icing. You think you have never tasted pancakes this good.

The waitress gives you dish towels to wipe your arms still wet from the pool, made worse by the relentless ice of the AC that undoes any benefits of a warm climate. You give her a tip that is 100% of your bill.

She is your guardian angel. You hope you are hers tonight.

The next day you sleep ‘til brunch and get lost in conversation while on the bus to the river, thus getting lost on the bus, so you don’t paddle board but settle on blackberry shaved ice, oily fried veggies for dinner, and two-stepping on the edge of town.

At first the dapper cowboys with their chivalry and their Christ and their lights and flags and footwork, extinct in the feminist land you come from, dazzle you with their grace and confidence.

They even pull you across the slick floor, boots clacking. You twirl, and the pancake alchemy persists.

But at some point between the circles your feet make gliding, and watching the couples, and turning around you to look at your newly former-strangers who are not your best friends, the gracemagic lemon poppy-seed pancakes and rivers like spines and blackberry syrup on your fingers provide weakens its spell.

And you are again just a girl.

In a place.

Alive and alone.

What is more anathema to the pancake two-stepping magic is not that you have no one you want to dance with, but that you have no one you want to tell there that there is no one you want to dance with.

And you are again just a girl.

In a place.

Alive and alone.

The silver lining is this: You can depend on that.