Celebration

I fought through the wind toward the lawn shed.  The leaves whipped by my exposed legs, and their slender stems scratched at my sandalled feet.  The flimsy clouds skimmed rapidly past the coquettish moon, flirty enough to shine, but not enough to expose.  The flashlight spotlighted the dirty white wall of the shed, sitting plumb against the slats of the fence.  I anchored the diminutive building with a bowline knot around a fencepost, and then walked it around its entirety, before again tying a knot around another fence post.  There.  The neighbors might wake up to their car underneath a lawn building, but not without a considerable length of fence with it.  I was sure they’d be comforted by the thought.

The time and place for such things was rapidly expiring.  November 20th.  A plane ticket and a rapid heartbeat and a few deep breaths followed by a few million more.  The ink on the contract was still wet.  All of a sudden no longer a drunken idiot college student in a podunk town in southeastern Wisconsin; all of a sudden instructing software engineers at Kaspersky Labs in downtown Moscow in the finer points of the English language.  That qualifies as an adventure, right?  On the Metro in the capital of Russia, shanked in the abdomen and missing a familiar barstool?  I have to describe St. Basil’s Cathedral to my friends as the "ice cream cone palace," although I’m fairly certain that the most recognizable Russian landmark in no way serves any sort of frozen treat.  Such explanations only underscore how vehemently exciting and terrifyingly foreign this encroaching travail happens to be.

To arrive in a place, however, you must leave somewhere else.  And now there are ghosts on park benches, in wild torrents of bedsheets in decrepit college houses, on a bit of torn up vinyl that adorns a familiar barstool.  I’m sure I’ll always be that stupid boy, chugging a bottle of pinot noir and cursing the sunlight.  I’m sure I’ll always be that awkward fledgling, filled with relief that I finally managed a bra without effort.  I’m sure I’ll always be that erstwhile man, suddenly able to do a job, and do it right.  Most importantly, I’ll always be that volatile spirit, dancing where this is no dancefloor, screaming when there is no megaphone, loving through a hellscape of hate.  As I trudged back toward the house, my phone vibrated.  "Let’s get hamboned," he told me, "to celebrate."  Always in celebration, only in celebration, we celebrate. 

Found this today, and it made me laugh.  New Year’s Eve/Day, circa 4 AM.  The woman in the middle is quite the wonderful little lady.  And Naude, there at the end, is one of my dearest friends, and a person I will miss quite a bit.