Away We Go / Ways We Go

It is somewhere in the realm of 3:30 AM --no, wait, it is later!-- and tomorrow morning I will be launching on a 24+ hour journey, ending up in La Paz, Bolivia. You don't even want to know the routing, it is that ridiculous. I should go to bed. Definitely. All logical signs point to bed, but I am not going to bed, at least not yet.

Perhaps this is because "my" bed (rather the slack-centered bed in a utterly innocuous hotel in North York) is mostly buried beneath the pile of stuff I have yet to weedle into my backpack. For example, after my midnight drugstore run I've ended up with a box of 60 travel/wet wipes, which are now stretched out in front of me like down-trodden dominos, while I debate whether or not I need all of them. On principle (travel principle, at least) I am against carrying 60 of anything, but long experience has taught me that wet wipes are one of the world's greatest achievements, and I would still run out if I carried 1000.

I keep playing with my hair. In a bit of a blur, while searching for a pair of "practical" women's sandals (and as a grumbled aside, such a thing seems not to exist) I instead found myself getting a haircut by a women with a hearing problem and a Texas-sized gap between her front teeth, hell-bent on putting in mousse, whether I wanted it or not. The hearing loss explains why she could not hear my heart attempting to catapault itself out my mouth, as it always does in such situations (haircuts, not travel). Still, nothing stirs up my superstitious-ness like going away, and after pre-trip cuts prior to my previous journeys, I feared the world might end should I go away unshorn. My hair looks fine. I think.

All that to say that sleep is clearly a low priority, when there are wet wipes and new hair to be considered. And until I am through considering my bed shall remain invisible, and I pass the time painting my toenails a gruesome shade of pink and meditating on travel. As if I may make up for the multitude of hours of trip preperation I somehow missed by staying up all night, pacing the hotel room and trying to recall how it feels to be on the move, to be Traveling (capital T included) once again. I guess it feels like this.

I hit the wrong button on my computer and Leonard Cohen begins to sing, "And who by fire, who by water..." on the other side of the room, in a bed guarded by the exact same painting that watches over mine, my father flinches in his sleep and the adreneline I'm swimming in is stifling, flooding my mead and my newly gruesome-tinted toes.

I am going away. I am going away. I am... getting tired.

It is somewhere in the relm of 4:30 AM, and it shall be some time before I see a bed again. So perhaps I should make use of it? Sleep sweet!

N.