being air

I should be in bed and I will be soon, but being on the eve of such a long awaited trip brings with it certain mind activities.  That sounds so vague and possibly drug-ridden, but it's really neither.  I'm just awake against my better sense.  I should be in bed—I want to be fresh in the morning—but my mind is going and I won't sleep until I exorcise some of the energy that is bopping around in my brain.  Today was a long day, and 99% of it was exactly what I expected it would be.  It wasn't until the last hours of the day that the day took a turn, a turn in the form of a new neighbor who invited herself over to my porch after arriving home, quite drunkenly in a cab.  I was saying goodbye to my garden, taking some time to for myself, sitting on the porch and looking at my dark cabbages, drinking a beer alone.  The neighbor got out of her cab and fumbled with her front door.  I sent a text message to my friend in Portland.  Guy showed up.  He saw me on my front porch and her on hers.  He said we were like a mirror of each other.  She said, Can I come over?  We said she could.  She stumbled over and told us all about everything.    

You don't know when you'll meet somebody new.  That's for sure.  You can plan your day down to the most minute details, even including a stop at the do-it-yourself car wash, but life seems to have a way of throwing curve balls.  I think, ideally, I would have had a couple drinks on my porch with Guy, one-on-one, sans my new drunken neighbor, but that isn't what life had in store for me.  Fate (or something) put this Mount Holyoke professor of Latin American studies on my porch, and I wasn't about to say, Go away, I'm leaving for New Mexico in the morning and I want this time alone with my friend.  It's just not how it happened, and that's not the mentality that I want to carry with me as I head out on this trip.  Plus, it turned out that my new neighbor had a lot to say about New Mexico.  She has relatives there.  At the very least we had some common ground.  I said, You picked a fine time to say hello; I'm leaving for New Mexico in the morning.  And so I am.

    
Air is what we all breathe, and air is what I most cherish.  I could be wrong, but I think I'm an air sign.  Is Libra an air sign?  I am no longer positive.  I only know that I am leaving tomorrow.  I am about to become a kind of air myself.  My mother is fond of saying that each thing prepares you for the next thing, and I would like to think that this unexpected meeting of my new neighbor has prepared me to travel well.  She did tell me that I seem open, and open is what I most want to be as I travel.  I want to be as open as a free gas station bathroom.  I want to be as open as a butterfly's wings on gasoline.  It is a certain kind of going, and I will do it the moment I wake up tomorrow.  Hooray.  If you haven't already "clicked the 6," you can do it as I travel openly into this blue blue world, the skies of which are clear and free and as blue as the shadow a god-shaped ashtray casts onto a candy bar.  It's a lot to think about, and I am going to think about all of it.  Cheers.