Champagne Sunsets

I have been sitting in the airport alone now for just 1 beer & nearly and hour and a half. I haven’t quite known yet what to say. Maybe I don’t quite know how to feel. It’s funny, every other moment like this in my life, when I am alone with my thoughts (or just alone in any sense), I typically have the incessant urge to write. I feel this anxious twitch to start forming sentences and paragraphs because I know that when I’m writing, even if that means I’m only here talking to myself, I don’t feel so alone.

But for some reason, in this hour and a half, at the bottom of this beer, I feel okay with just being alone. More of that has to do with not wanting to open up my mind for company, not wanting to have to know just what to say and just how to feel. Not quite yet anyway.

The last time I sat here at this airport, I was a whole different roaring whirl of emotion, boarding a flight to Thailand in what seems like a completely different life now. I ranted about what I wanted and what I didn’t want out of love and relationships, as if those were the most important things to be determining in that particular moment. And I suppose, back then, in that past life, they were. I want to feel things are different today. I want to feel secure and content and confident. In a lot of ways I do certainly feel those things. Mostly, right now though, I feel quite calm. There is nothing roaring, there is nothing whirling. But again, I think this is just my autopilot mode for not wanting to let loose what might come stumbling out of my mind if I do let all of those thoughts free to wander.

Once again, for the umpteenth time, I am about to embark on a brand new journey in a brand new life, thousands of miles from any single person I know and love in my world. I am picking up and moving out. I am saying goodbyes that feel all-too permanent. I am letting the wind blow me westwards, with absolutely no idea what to truly expect. Because that’s just the kind of fleeting life I have chosen. An existence built on breaking my own comfort zones and testing my own strengths and limits. 

And even when those airport kisses feel different than any I’ve ever had before, even when those final moments and final words pass briefly, but genuinely between our lips, even when I recognize for an isntant that we really don’t know how to do this properly, even when for just one fleeting moment I truly believe and feel that I will actually be missed… I stop to remind myself: we’ve had this coming all along.

Well see, there go those thoughts wandering.

So I’ll let them dip back to the happiest little evening I had last night, with the most wonderful people and the most fantastic view that I will surely miss the absolute most. It was cheap chicken burgers and chips, dressed to the nines at South Beach, watching this last day softly slip away from us.

Amidst hectic work schedules and sleeping patterns and moving house and social obligations, all of my favourite and most appreciated mates came out to pop a bottle or two, toasting this latest departure and all that we’ve built leading up to it. Sitting straight-line and front row for that champagne sunset cinema, we watched the sky blush cotton candy floss pink and blues to our left, deep orange and reds to our right. We watched the sky steal our daylight and then we layed on our backs counting stars and satellites.

I didn’t mean to go noticing the details that I will miss most, but I remember finding a few. Like the feeling of tiny grains of sand against smooth skin, when finger tips meet chins and cheekbones, gently pulling each other in for soft touches. Or the way you can never seem to remember exactly when the evening sky turned from light pink to pitch black, because you were too busy laughing with the gulls, or swapping far out theories of time and space and life and wonder. That distinct feeling of belonging, of being in the exact right place at the exact right time.

I’ll remember those things. I’ll miss them heaps, along with about a hundred other details of this little NSW world I’ve formed around my happiest self. But if all is meant to be, I have to believe each and every one of those lovely things will be here whenever I return back here to this paradise life.