Flight

I stood there stupidly, just past Customs with my whole life in tow. It was only a carry-on sized load. All I could do was stare dumbly at the black screen of my phone.

"Miss, you have to move on."

Yeah, tell me about it.

"Connecting flights to the left, exit to the right."

I almost explained to the guard that I didn't know what I was doing, that I had a big decision to make and many factors to consider. But, too exhausted to find the words, I didn't bother. I went to the right and got in a cab.

I had knots in my stomach all the way into Manhattan. What was I doing? I had willfully missed my connecting flight out of New York and I didn't have any money to pay a cab. I was trusting the word of a man that I had never met in person who had told me not to worry about it. He was a good friend of a good friend, but still, was I insane?

When I left Slater in the Istanbul airport, we were both in tears. His were silent, masculine, and graceful, and mine were hot, messy, and snotty with terrible facial contortions and body convulsions as accompaniments. My expressions of grief only worsened as I passed the point of no return and headed toward the boarding gate, his smell still in my hair. It didn't seem possible that in the few weeks we were together that we could fill holes in each others hearts that neither of us knew we had, and yet... there we were. Ripping ourselves out again, cutting the cords, pulling ourselves away before the idea had fully formed, imaginations running wild with the thick spread of idealism and the glitter of day dreams. I took off with a barely brave face streaked with those tears.

Two glasses of white and a couple painkilling sleeping pills later, I woke up an hour away from New York, having processed nothing. And yet, in that time something emotionally significant had transpired.  I left Istanbul behind in an ancient dream universe and found myself literally plummeting forth into another adventure, another city, and another man.

Meet Slater in the previous post.
For more considerations of polyamory and the traveling lifestyle, check out Distance: Emotional Problems of Nomadism.