apples, bagels and soup

i spent most of my first weekend with kylie, which was great, because apart from getting a regular dose of the aussie accent, we’ve gotten to know each other much better than we ever did in sydney. as it’s just been the two of us, there’ve been lots of conversations, of the sort we never had the opportunity to have back home.

on tuesday meera took the chinatown bus in from boston to spend a day with me, which was all kinds of loveliness and fun, and also inebriation and hilarity. we dared risk the wrath of the driver and cabbed back to brooklyn after we emerged from the restaurant we’d been drinking and eating chocolate mousse cake at, close to midnight and in no real state to work out how to get home by subway. fortunately we found ourselves a cabbie that not only drove us (cheerfully!), but, one block away from our destination a man tried to hail the cab to get back to manhattan, and we happily let him get in with us so the cabbie would have a return fare after dropping us off.

meera’s visit was 24 hours of catching up on the recent past but also getting acquainted from scratch, in a way, because of that odd thing of knowing each other from high school, but never having been friends then. still, it was like being with an old friend with whom you have a shared history and thus a rich understanding, in a sense, of each other. it’s probably because of that, that after i saw her off at the chinatown bus station, i was hit by an awful sense of loneliness, such that i hadn’t felt since arriving till then.

since then the homesickness has been palpable, and comes in waves. i say homesickness, but i must admit that it is when i think of the boy that i feel it the most. and since i think about him so often, suffice to say it is an ache that i carry around an awful lot.

we told ourselves that 2 years with travel and technology would be a walk in the park, but i know these are double-edged swords. having him visit for a month in december will be wonderful, but how will i let him leave? video ichat is a fantastic little piece of technology, but how much more pronounced is our inability to physically be together when seeing him in realtime conveys his presence so strongly?

at times i am so weakened by missing him that the only thing i can do is whip out my itp course outlines and read them furiously, over and over, and remind myself what the hell it is i’m doing here, spending too much money i don’t have, on the other side of the world from my life and my love.

immersing myself in itp course outlines helps. meeting my classmates has too, but that’s a story for another day.