99.9% of the time I enter an airport with Jeremy it's to say goodbye, and almost always I have Ella Fitzgerald in my head - singing about dying / crying / wondering why-ing a little.
While the dying bit is melodramatic, even for me, the song has become something of a theme tune for these goodbyes, with snippets of it weaving their way into the final days of every visit. (I'm aware that theme tunes are all a bit too Ally McBeal circa 1998 but we've already established that Ally and I have an affinity, although I would like to claim the edge on sanity and I don't plan to stay with the show until it becomes embarrassingly unwatchable.) And with the song comes the anticipatory sadness - about a day before the Goodbye (I'm getting better at it - in the early days of our relationship I got sad before we'd ever said hello)- every joke, smile, touch of hand, underlines the knowledge that tomorrow we'll be 3000 miles apart again.
Today I said Goodbye to Jeremy for what is quite probably the last time. All the usual feelings were there right on cue - the aching at the back of my throat, the tingling up my nose and stinging in my eyes, clinging to him like a limpet and then when it really is time to peel myself away, crying unashamedly in public until I finally pull myself together right before sitting down on the plane next to some poor soul who has probably witnessed the whole spectacle and is probably terrified I'm going to spend the whole journey snivelling into my sleeve.
However today when I walked away, Ella wasn't singing, The Rolling Stones were (I just had to google it as actually had no idea who the song was by), with 'This could be the Last Time' (also in my googling I read the rest of the lyrics - the only applicable ones are in the chorus and the general gist of the song is opposite to what I'm talking about...not a particularly good theme tune choice, but it was in my head all the same). And through the tears and snot and spectacle, I smiled to myself and started bopping my head in time to the imaginary music as I walked down the travelator, past some slow moving bemused spaniards whilst Vonda Shepherd took over the song.
Showing posts with label madrid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label madrid. Show all posts
Meet me in Madrid...
Next week, Jeremy and I are meeting in Madrid.
You might think it's romantic, meeting the man you love in a foreign country. In reality it just means travelling alone, which means I don't have anyone to tell me that planes don't crash because of turbulence, and while I'm not entirely convinced by this (and have recently garnered evidence that it can do you some serious injury), it's comforting to have someone's hand to clutch and squeeze hard whenever the seat-belt sign gets switched on. Also, this time, Jeremy (who arrives 6 hours earlier than me) has gallantly declared he's going to the hotel to sleep and I can make my own way there. While I don't really want him hanging around jet-lagged for 6 hours, I also kinda do...
Anyway, I digress. What I've been thinking about is that this is one of the last time we're going to be doing this - where it once felt that this crazy scenario of airport hellos and goodbyes would never end, there are now a finite amount of these left. So I've been thinking if there's anything about long-distancing that I'm gonna miss...
....
Nope, nothing.
Here's the thing - long distance relationships suck. Embarking on one was probably the daftest thing I've ever done (and I'm still amazed that Jeremy, pragmatic as he is, even contemplated it). They are sleep-sapping, paranoia-inducing, money-draining and intimacy-lacking. My mum is fond of telling me that relationships don't stay still, they either go forward or back. Well I reckon that for every 2 steps of relationship progress Jeremy and I made when together, there's been at least 1 step of regress when apart (1.5 in Februarys.) Thankfully (miraculously?), we seem to be good enough together when together that in 6.5 years of 2 steps forward, 1 step back we've managed to progress to marriage.
So when we meet in Madrid this time, it's going to be with a growing sense of achievement and anticipation - that future journeys will be made with hands to hold (I doubt Jeremy is too pleased about this) and most importantly that planes wont need to be boarded or time zones crossed in order to see each other.
Of course I shouldn't get too smug - they say the first year of marriage is the hardest, and in that year I've chosen to move countries and so eliminate my entire support system. But hey, we've made it this far... I'm going to shut up now before I start singing Shania Twain.
You might think it's romantic, meeting the man you love in a foreign country. In reality it just means travelling alone, which means I don't have anyone to tell me that planes don't crash because of turbulence, and while I'm not entirely convinced by this (and have recently garnered evidence that it can do you some serious injury), it's comforting to have someone's hand to clutch and squeeze hard whenever the seat-belt sign gets switched on. Also, this time, Jeremy (who arrives 6 hours earlier than me) has gallantly declared he's going to the hotel to sleep and I can make my own way there. While I don't really want him hanging around jet-lagged for 6 hours, I also kinda do...
Anyway, I digress. What I've been thinking about is that this is one of the last time we're going to be doing this - where it once felt that this crazy scenario of airport hellos and goodbyes would never end, there are now a finite amount of these left. So I've been thinking if there's anything about long-distancing that I'm gonna miss...
....
Nope, nothing.
Here's the thing - long distance relationships suck. Embarking on one was probably the daftest thing I've ever done (and I'm still amazed that Jeremy, pragmatic as he is, even contemplated it). They are sleep-sapping, paranoia-inducing, money-draining and intimacy-lacking. My mum is fond of telling me that relationships don't stay still, they either go forward or back. Well I reckon that for every 2 steps of relationship progress Jeremy and I made when together, there's been at least 1 step of regress when apart (1.5 in Februarys.) Thankfully (miraculously?), we seem to be good enough together when together that in 6.5 years of 2 steps forward, 1 step back we've managed to progress to marriage.
So when we meet in Madrid this time, it's going to be with a growing sense of achievement and anticipation - that future journeys will be made with hands to hold (I doubt Jeremy is too pleased about this) and most importantly that planes wont need to be boarded or time zones crossed in order to see each other.
Of course I shouldn't get too smug - they say the first year of marriage is the hardest, and in that year I've chosen to move countries and so eliminate my entire support system. But hey, we've made it this far... I'm going to shut up now before I start singing Shania Twain.
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