I woke up as if by premonition.
Four A.M.
The room was dark and soundless except for the steady blinking clockface of an unset video player and the buzz-saw of my husband’s snoring.
Because I was awake, I checked my phone for changes since the last time I let myself distractedly doom scroll … sometime before turning in for the night and actually falling asleep. Of course, there was news and emails I could ignore, but there was also a text message from my daughter who was traveling for spring break.
At first, I was a little nervous. Not about the hour (she was in a different time zone, afterall) but about the volume. Although I hadn’t read any of them yet, there seemed to be too many words to be a “happy” communique.
But I took a breath and began digesting, immediately understanding from the first sentence that she was miserable, and enjoying it.
As I continued thumbing through the missive, she ranted in glorious detail about the hardships of traveling – the confusion of not being able to find your hotel lobby because it looks like a fancy cafe; or missing one train, and then another, and finding out you’ve gotten on the wrong one anyway. She tucks expletives between every third word describing how she had gone from a flawless experience during her arrival to a disaster spiral upon departure.
“Ok, perfect. Great. Wonderful! Like ha-ha, everyone else here knows what they are doing. But the terminal is not the terminal, and the stop is not the stop. There are no train numbers, and nothing makes sense to me. … and a lady with a fancy scarf is asking me why I’m looking at the app instead of the board … which doesn’t look like a board at all. So now I am forced to hate EVERYONE because it appears I might have to live here now.”
Three dots appear before there is more:
She recounts that she and her traveling companion woke up later than they had planned to and missed breakfast. Then, the first tourist destination they arrived at was unexpectedly closed. They selected a familiar coffee chain to get a quick infusion of caffeine, but forgot to place the order “To Go.”
So they sat at a table with glassware and tried to “cannonball” iced teas.
They stopped in shops and bought presents. She includes photos of a set of pottery bowls she’s bringing back.
I can picture her flailing her arms and spinning on her heel once or twice as she exhales her tension in the torrent of contrary words. She is having a blast.
I am smiling in the dark and wondering if I should nudge my husband to share his morsel of news from abroad.
Instead, I press her last word bubble until the phone lets me respond with a “Ha ha” emoji.
Her immediate response makes me laugh harder: “What the heck!? Why aren’t you in bed?”
“Motherly instinct, perhaps: I had to make sure you were having a blast and not causing an international incident. I can go back to sleep now.”
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