Vacation’s Over
It’s 6 am. I’m in a plane headed back to Los Angeles. My vacation is over. My sister is married. And in 5 hours I’ll be back behind my desk at work.
When I’m on vacation, I leave everything behind. My work, my friends, my dog. I don’t want to think about anything.
I fall off the grid. I don’t answer phone calls, return e-mails. I want people to know that they can’t get a hold of me, so they won’t call me. They won’t present problems that I don’t want to deal with.
But now that I’m on the plane, headed back, I have to think about the things that I didn’t want to think about before.
Like the girl who has been staying in my apartment taking care of Tucker while I was away. She’s 18 from Canada. I only met her one time. A week before I left for New York. She needed a place to stay, and I needed someone to take care of my dog.
At the time, it seemed like a good idea because everything always seems like a good idea when you don’t want to spend the time to find a real solution. But in the 45 minutes I met her, she seemed trustworthy and I’m a moron who always gets sucked in by my favorite word, FREE.
So she’s been living in my apartment for 2 weeks.
On the first day I received an e-mail from her. She smelled gas in my apartment so she called the gas company and had them shut it off.
I know there wasn’t a gas leak. The pilot light wasn’t lit. It happens all the time. But I didn’t respond to her e-mail because if she took it upon herself to shut off the gas, then what else was she doing?
And now I want to know everything.
Is she a Canadian meth-head who is using my apartment to meltdown boxes of Sudafed into meth? Did she sell all my stuff on e-bay to pay for her thousand dollar a week coke habit? Maybe she locked my dog in a closet and refused to feed him? Is he even alive? Do I have a dog?
The plane is about to take off.
I click my heals three times.
I don’t want to go home.
I don’t want to go home.
I don’t want to go home.
Damn it.
The plane takes off.
I’m going home.
