Day One

7 AM, Halifax airport. Hope springs eternal. That the 29E – back row, middle seat – on my boarding card is a mistake. That a non-reclining Kate-sandwich is not my fate for the next six thousand miles to Vancouver.

Airport breakfast features bacon-flavoured strips + tetra-pak eggs + perfectly uniform, cube-shaped potato missiles (drown in ketchup from communal trough dispenser: check). Redeeming it all, globbing it all together into an unrecognizable, congealed mass: melted ‘cheese’ slices for my inner trailer-park-girl. The kind of petroleum by-product that justifies a ‘zed’ on the end (the equivalent, in the cheez world, of putting your “hands way up in the air, and wavin’ like you just don’t care”).

<fast-forward>

Surreal. Totally surreal. Awake for more than 20 hours. Feel:

• 50% raised by wolves
• 25% like we never left, and Evan was just a dream
• 15% sentimental
• 15% incapable of coherent thought (or simple mathematics), and already fearing defeat by exhaustion

Am trying to nap in this hotel room but the city waits outside, mocking me. I am here! Eyes are two pissholes. Time for blow-torched mackerel, starting at midnight Halifax time.

Later this night, after wandering:

• Immaculate, delicious-smelling gay men and wasted, convulsing junkies everywhere. Why must everyone inspire either awestruck-gaping or nose-holding? Is there no middle ground?
  
• Maybe Nova Scotia is more home to me now than I knew. I was so busy mourning for my mistress, I hadn’t noticed. It is as spectacular as ever, but all feels foreign.
• At Robson and Burrard, a man wearing nothing but running shorts and fuzzy green slippers walked in front of me and ran into traffic, yelling. No one blinked.
• My hotel room: tonight’s scene for full scale let-it-all-hang-outedness. Despite the appreciated saferoom of marriage, nothing quite beats the lack of witness a hotel room provides to oneself.
• Turning the corner on yet another downtown mountain view corridor still stops me. Fashionistas and junkies and asian school girls and yoga instructors pile up at my back like Augustus Gloop stuck in Willy Wonka's chocolate pipe.

Day Two

Greasy breakfast, japanese lunch, liquid supper. Fabulously smart people. Amazing how easily one slips back into office life, funky bricky coffee-breaky life, despite the accustomed dining room table. CEO smirkily asked how’s life in Tatooine? Earned moderate street cred with at least it’s not remote as the spice mines of the Kessel galaxy, which are millions of light years away.

Day Three

Greasier breakfast, thai lunch, liquid supper, liquid dessert. The mistress is mine again. It’s fantastic, this interlude. I am collaborating, and it doesn't involve anyone else's bum. Am zipped back two years like magic (except for the boobs).

Day Four

People keep saying, Your first time away? Poor you! Does it feel like your arm has been cut off? Are you worried? Have you been sleeping? And I want to answer FRIG no! Frig no! Frig YES!

I miss him like a best buddy, a treasured companion. I can’t wait for the moment when I see him again… drench him in kisses, get entangled in him once more. The thought of it makes me giddy (not to mention the thought of my own personal turnout-gear-clad Mr. July).

In the meantime, I know they're fine. All the world is filled with exotic possibility, company, time, food, Granville Island Cypress Honey Lager. And I must say – mothers everywhere, nod in affinity – This. Is. Decadence. Incarnate.

Day Five

Today was Friday, my last day in the office. Not much writing accomplished this week, but rare and priceless face-meeting, stake-planting. The more that happens on this trip, the less I feel the need to reflect. It is an invigorating blur, such a high.

Day Six

One last free day in Vancouver. Took aquabus to Granville Island, wandered, met friends, had lunch in Deep Cove, wandered, went for hike on Mount Seymour, wandered. All I saw and tasted and felt was sweet and lush and deep… and it all became normal faster than expected. Am now dosed up with career and mountain methadone, ready to see my two fellas.

I can go home, the place I now know is home, satiated.