Goodbye, Farewell

This past weekend was one long-winded pub crawl interspersed with snippets of sleep, food and idle banter, and peppered with lots of laughs. Entertaining out of town guests is always fun, and I welcome the challenge of finding great venues for cocktails and victuals, great walks and views. If the opportunity for entertainment in a more cultural form comes along, even better.

The best part of having someone stay in my apartment is when they finally leave. Strangely enough, it is often also the worst part. Once the wheelie case makes it down the hall, my small one bedroom starts to close in on me a bit, and even my cat looks at me as though I will never have any hope of keeping anyone in the place for longer than a week. It makes me wonder, too, if I really could ever live with anyone again. I used to long for a time I could share everything I had, including space and possessions, but now I am realizing that it may not be the best way to go about things. Living with someone creates intimacy and closeness, but it also manages to expose habits and nuances that I don't know if I want exposed to anyone. The exhaustion I feel after having a friend from out of town is not so much showing them around and playing tour guide, but also a sort of pent up anxiety about them seeing how I live. The cat, the dusty windowsill, the refrigerator bereft of greens, but brimming with booze. My lifestyle may almost appear Jonesian in a certain light, and I fear this glimpse, this view. The only way to avoid it is going out into the wild and returning when it is dark and we are all too buzzed to see it.