I am home now.
I doubt that I would have noticed it so much if I hadn’t been away for three weeks, but it is now entirely clear.
And I know. I suck. I’m sorry. Right now, if you live in New York, you’re sitting there fuming and wondering how it is that I was an hour from you for three weeks and we never hung out. You’re not alone, and it’s all my fault: I was freaking out over the wedding and the shower and the visa thing, and I only came into the city twice, and left much earlier than I had planned to both times. And it all turned out fine, except for the wedding part, which hasn’t technically happened yet and is still completely unresolved, so I should have just been living it up in New York every night, but I just don’t work that way.
Forgive me. I do feel bad about it.
It is nice to be back, though; nothing to feel bad about there. The flight was an absolute nightmare–never fly Aer Lingus if you can help it–and I was a bit concerned when I walked through the door to the sound of my puppy growling at the intrusion. She got over it almost immediately, though, and went so crazy that Nick soon suggested that I set her down. And, a few minutes later, that I sit on the floor until she calmed down a smidge, because otherwise she wasn’t going to. When I ran out to the pharmacy across the street, I heard her whimpering down two flights of stairs. She barked at Nick when he went into the bathroom. She has obviously decided to take it upon herself to make sure that neither of us is ever away again, which is going to present a problem when Nick takes off tomorrow for the better part of the week.
My favorite thing, though, is the people. Not that the people are intrinsically so radically different here: it has recently occurred to me that there must be really, really obnoxious people in every country. The one big selling point of being here is that I don’t have to listen to them.
I felt assaulted the minute that I landed in JFK. While here, I had more or less convinced myself that I must just be no good at eavesdropping, and that the murmured conversations that I have been not quite hearing since March were simply out of my range.
I am a perfectly fine eavesdropper, and when those conversations are in English, I hear every word. I have to. I can’t shut it off, and people are horrible. I really don’t want to know what they have to say: the teenagers walking behind me in New Canaan, the Irish bachelorettes on the plane, the couple fighting over the heads of their children…every awful word that intrudes on my personal space. When they speak English, I have no choice. It was like suddenly developing psychic powers, and it was deafening.
When I landed in Charles de Gaulle and heard the rush of voices that broke around me, it was bliss that I cannot fully describe, except to say that I was three days sleepless and three weeks crazy and I still noticed the privacy that I slipped back into as easily as an old pair of Nick’s pajamas.
He unpacked my suitcase; we ran with the dog; we poured wine and popped popcorn and spent hours and hours watching Grey’s Anatomy, which Nick inexplicably loves. Don’t ask him about it. He’ll lie. But he literally cannot stop watching it. He keeps on putting on episode after episode…and demands that I pause it when he goes to get more wine and popcorn. Raspberry prices are down, and the grapefruit that I opened for Nick this morning was the first one that ever smelled so good that I was tempted to try some of it. And tomorrow my bakery will be open and I will go out in search of wedding shoes…and maybe a corset?
And life will pick back up as it left off, until I go back to see the nice consulate guy, and maybe go for a drink or two in Manhattan, and turn right back around to rejoin Nick and Jolie for walking and wine and popcorn and the lovely hum of privacy.