One Foot on the Platform

I hiked the 200m from the door of work to the train station.  Waited for fifteen minutes and stood up to get on.  The woman next to me looked at me excitedly, with a little pity, ‘that looks like a heavy load?’  ‘It is,’ I said.  ‘But it’s a happy burden you take when you’re starting a holiday.’  She laughed and agreed and polite conversation ensued for the next one minute and thirty-five seconds till the train arrived.  ‘Have an awesome time,’ she said.  ‘I’m so jealous.’  I smiled with fake enthusiasm, said thankyou and got on the train.  

I spent all morning this morning in various types of distress.  Ranging from obsessive list making and reading to all out hyperventilating tears.  I haven’t cried like that before a holiday since my first solo trip overseas what feels like a thousand years ago.  In my personal history tears, and convulsing ones at that, were always associated with the end of holidays.  As a kid I would spend the entire last day of holidays sobbing, heaving and protesting that I didn’t want to go home.  My parents may have thought it was endearing to begin with but I am certain that by the time I’d done it on our twenty-third family holiday it was only met with disdain and disapproval.  

In hindsight I guess I was just sad that the time we spent doing stuff was over and that now we all had to go back to like it normally was.  People going off to work, arguements, homework, chores – all the normal stuff.  I tell myself now it was the time we were spending that I was mourning, chances are the tantrums were infintiely less noble and it just meant we wouldn’t get to do or get as much fun stuff.  

Packing for this holiday has felt wrong all along.  How on earth can I be packing to go away, for fun, when the rest of my life has so recently fallen apart?  I know that my life will continue to chug along with our without my participation, and that it won’t stop regardless of my active part in it but it feels fucking awful to think of leaving home before we’ve even chosen Dad’s headstone. We may have done that, I don’t know, I’ve been so busy breathing and forcing myself to do lots of outside things, I’ve forgotten to check, but you get my point.  Getting out of the house this morning knowing that my Dad will not be standing next to my Mum when I get off the plane in two weeks was fucking hard.  

So what do you do?  Not go?  I asked that.  It wasn’t an option apparently.  I was met with varying responses of, ‘you’ll get on that plane if I have to carry you,’ ‘are you nuts?  It was free!’ ‘I can’t see your Dad ever liking that decision,’ and ‘what are you going to do here?’  While all responses were valid, none of them made an iota of difference about the sickness of going. Mum’s simple, ‘Go, have a good time,’ was enough of an affirmation that it was ok, and that it is the right decision, but it was the woman on the platform that made all of the difference.

To her, I was some crazy woman with a pack that was way too big for her and about to embark on a Japanese adventure.  She was excited and jealous and happy that I was about to have a good time.  She wasn’t thinking about what a good idea it was to get away or thinking what an opportunity it was to get my head together, she just thought it was fun.  Japan will be both of those things but it will also be filled with people who don’t know that my Dad just died.  It will be filled with people who will  make judgements about my job, what I look like, my terrible attempts at flirting and my lack of tolerance for miso soup and sake.  To them, I can be anything I want.  I think I am going to start by making myself a little less sadder and a lot funnier than I actually am.  That’s my general plan, that or meet a sumo wrestler who can shower me with gifts.  We’ll see how that rolls out.  First I have to survive the train trip through Logan.  Wish me luck!