Familiar/Strange

Too wet and gusty to do what I had planned for the day, and so I sit and sip cappuccino, eat fancy pastry for breakfast. Dashing, umbrella-covered, from tube station to museum. I love museums in general, and especially when they contain a lot of solid objects -- sculpture, silver relics, jewels. I find myself sometimes painting-weary, but a case filled with tiny bits of shining wonder always fascinates. There is a room filled with tapestries, floor to ceiling, vast. It smells of chemicals and stale air -- climate and acid and everything else controlled, to help with preservation. It is dizzying, staring up at these -- and even when the aesthetics leave something (or even much) to be desired, the thought of all the hours, all the labor, going into this makes each tiny thread a miracle. All afternoon in several museums, and suddenly I am exhausted in a way that falls on me like bricks. But it is too late, now, to return to my hotel and rest -- so I halfway doze on the train, and numbly make my way upstairs to the main station, where someone waits for me.

We go for coffee, nearby -- for in two hours I am meeting someone else for a drink, in this same station -- and sit and talk. So jarringly tall, in person, (and oh, so young!) but otherwise familiar. Yawning extravagantly, and I apologize repeatedly -- two late nights and so much walking and not enough sleep and I am ready to curl into a ball on the floor and never wake up. Laughing and talking, and suddenly it is nearly two hours later and I need to rush off. He walks me back to the station, and we stand around while I wait for the man I'm supposed to be meeting -- and it occurs to me, suddenly, that I am not at all convinced I will recognize him. I am not at all consistently able to translate people-as-they-are-in-photographs into people-as-they-are-standing-before-me. The camera skews, or lacks...something. And indeed, finally a man who had been standing nearby approaches and tentatively says my name. (I wasn't expecting you to be here with anyone, so it took me a few minutes...) Hugs goodbye, pull his cheek down to my lips for a kiss, and off we go, to a nearby pub. He gets a bottle of wine without asking me, and though I tell him I can only have one glass, he keeps pouring and I end up with half the bottle. So when I leave -- already later than I ought to be -- I am also tipsy and giggling. He finds this amusing (and I am the strangest encounter he's had, it seems).

Arrive, still slightly numb and off-center, at the station where I'm supposed to meet you, and realize that there are four -- or even more than that -- possible exits you might be, and I don't know which one you're at and here I am, half-drunk and phone-less. Walk down the block and find a phone box, and when I get you on the phone I try to tell you where I am, exactly. And I'm a bit drunk, too... (For let it never be said I don't know how to make a first impression.) After all this stress and change-of-plans, and all these months, it is a strange relief to meet you. You are -- and this is also a relief -- so easy to be with, in person, in the same space. You take me to dinner, somewhere ridiculously posh, expensive. The food is phenomenal (and I have eaten so well, this trip). And there is more wine. Though when we leave, hours later, I am clear-headed sober. And when I tell you I have unlocked the mystery of your appeal, and what it is, you smile and say I said that once before -- before we ever met -- although you still don't know (and didn't then) to whom I am comparing you. (And maybe that, itself, explains it all.)