Out of Habit

It seems I've lost my blog-head. I miss it.

For years that's how I walked around, my brain full of intros and outros; thinking of a phrase that really needed to be written down; the words I might use in a vain attempt to make you see what I was seeing.

That doesn't happen any more, for whatever reason. I think it started with wanting to keep my love life more private than I had. I think the novel last November finished it. I've been pulled more to fiction and longer pieces, and lord knows I've got a limited amount of time and/or energy for writing.

At any rate, that in part explains why I went to Winnipeg and came back without posting even once. I thought about it, but in that way where you think you should want to do something, not because you're bursting to do it.

But Winnipeg, yes.

I went out there for a long overdue visit to Chris, who I befriended a few weeks into library school and was the only thing that made my life in Halifax bearable - until we added Grace and Greg and Daniel to our twosome and we all got each other through the special kind of hell that is an MLIS.

Right, Winnipeg.

If you stand in one spot in Chris' hall you can see both the Assiniboine and Red Rivers. The Assiniboine is wide and leads you straight east into the sunrise. The Red is a snake's curve through the elms way off in the distance.

They've got a swank pad, her and her man, with two balconies and lots of natural light. I had my own room and woke up to that sunrise every morning, though only enough to think "I should get up and watch that from the balcon-"

We took the bus; we walked. I saw several local characters - Fast Freddy, former shoplifter and pool shark, who takes good care of his shoes - Someone Low, a strange writer-type man with a knack for saying just the wrong thing - Eric Pyle, about whom Chris' man said "Some indie rockers develop job skills when they realize they're not going to make it. And then there's Eric Pile." - and then an Ex who shall not be named, but about whom I'd heard a lot and was more famous to me than all those other people combined.

There was art, a movie, diners, bridges. The Nonsuch at the Manitoba Museum brought on the vertigo I hadn't felt in months. Chris swears up and down it was moored solid, but my inner ear saw fit to inform me otherwise.

There was sitting and reading and talking and talking. We fell easily back into step - we always do, after the first hour or so of disorientation.

Standing at the bus stop early Sunday morning, waiting for the 20 Academy to take me to the airport, we talked some more. Chris told me about flying business class - for cheap - from DC to Chicago.

"It was so nice," she said. "All this room, and food. The man beside me was pretty grumpy. But I didn't care, because I had a beautiful fruit plate."

I started laughing, hard. And crying a little too, a little wet around the lashes.

"I don't know why, but that sentence encapsulates everything I love about you."

She hooted and threw her arms around me. We hugged tight and kept laughing.