No taxes before breakfast in Wherelings and Whenlings

It is completely, utterly predictable that Today is The Day I Decide To Write, Fucking Finally.

Because today I have to catch a flight in 12 hours and do my taxes before that, and pack, so of COURSE I feel inspired to write.

Whatever. I think I'm well qualified to make the legal and medical decision that taxes before breakfast (barackfest?) are bad for the digestion. What can you do? I haven't eaten yet (and what follows, logically, is that I just won't eat breakfast at all).

The flight I have to get on is a flight "home," to Chicago.

I've managed, in the couple of years I've lived there, to make it bearable. Chicago is dirty and the weather is terrible and it's full of people I don't relate to because there are too many midwesterners from small towns that love living in The City, and all I want to do is move to a small town and avoid bars every week from Thursday to Sunday.

But oh right - the part about it being bearable. My roommates. My roommates' dogs. Biking. My job. Andrew. Theater. All-american anarchism with local roots. My family. Living far from the madding crowd(s of hipsters, students and tourists).

Despite all of the things that I've decided make Chicago a suitable place to live for a short time in my twenties, I'm dreading going back.

Part of this is due to the fact that I consistently get return-trip-anxiety, which usually involves worrying that in the time it takes me to get home, something terrible will happen, like the house burning down, or a virus outbreak that directly affects my loved ones, or a car accident on the way to pick me up, or...

I've just always worried, no matter how much I've hated my homes, historically, that I can never go back, and the closer I get to going back, the more I psych myself out about it, convincing myself that the inevitable heartbreak of trying and failing to return is not worth the attempt. It's a dark, dark feeling in my stomach that spreads through my body until I've set foot in my house.

So there's that, and there's also the fact that this trip has been so much better than my real life, to the point that it makes more sense for me to call THIS my real life, and Chicago my fake life.

On a very general level, I've felt completely satisfied with the past two and a half weeks because I've spent almost all of them with various people that I love and that love me, people I haven't seen in far too long and other people that I haven't spent enough or any time with before. Family, friends, ex-lovers and future lovers, and new dogs and old dogs. And I've spent time drinking and partying and watching the sun rise over Los Angeles multiple mornings in a row and hours on the amtrak with green hills and the ocean speeding by, and I people-watched in Silicon Valley and went to daily tea-time with Stanford math grad students who really do spend hours together writing symbols on chalkboards and I wrote long letters from everywhere. And I spent long days lizard-watching in the hot, spiky discomfort of the Sonoran Desert and nights in its wonderfully cool and active darkness, and a weekend in a completely sterile , paved and civilized illusion of an oasis within it, which, in many ways, is more uncomfortable than the desert itself, but I guess will help with the transition of returning to my own asphalt-and-concrete "home."

More specifically:

I went to a family reunion! There were more than fifty of us and it was awesome, despite the inevitable drama of an entire family of Salvadorans drinking too much and trying to do things together over the course of a single weekend (things got pretty bad at one point - people left, people cried, people yelled...but then they came back. and cried more. but stayed).

The Cousins consider ourselves much more relaxed and reasonable than our hot-headed parents. We built blanket forts (median ages 15-25), took naps, played Loteria, drank root beer floats (after we felt we had had enough alcohol), watched Mulan, and just generally bonded, which we haven't gotten the chance to do all at once in over a decade. We talked about tattoos and how none of us really want kids right now and what we're considering doing with our lives and about our parents, who have been irreversibly fucked up by their abusive, alcoholic parents and by war and death and culture, and isn't it great that we all turned out so great anyway? Cause we totally did.

Also -

I spent a day traversing San Francisco through thunderstorms that everyone insisted never happen there

I visited one of my friend-loves-of-my-life with whom which nothing ever changes, and had drinks in Palo Alto with an ex-something who apologized for how he treated me during our non-relationship

I took a 24 hour train ride

I spent a day in Tucson during which I felt a lot of feelings

I went back to the desert/border and got my heart ripped open all over again, not that it had ever really healed. Ideally, I'd like to rip it out my chest and squeeze all the blood out over the main headquarters of our department of homeland "security." I'm pretty sure that's the only thing that would make it feel better.

I am finishing up in Mesa (Arizona), where I've won a lot of games of cribbage, lost a lot of games of bingo, mourned the impending death of a good friend's dog, and drank (too much?) with someone that I guess it might be a pattern with now, and got to see my "cousin" (godfather's son), who is an excellent dancer and not a bro at all, even though I thought he'd be based on his facebook, which just goes to show.

I am full of stories and feelings that I can't wait to share.

But I'm going to have to wait, because I don't think I can hold out on this breakfast thing, and then, you know, taxes.

Gah, taxes. Talk about going right back to real life.