As quickly as this strange week began it ended with Elise and I fitting two guitars into her backseat ontop of a puzzle of luggage piled ontop of Kat and Jason. I was back up the stairs before they pulled away… maybe in a rush to attempt to write it all down, or maybe not really wanting to see them all leave.
The plan started out simply enough. Kat had no intentions of flying back to California for break, and instead was going to split her time between Jason’s oft-mocked farm somewhere else in Pennsylvania, and Elise’s in New Jersey. The plan was for her to crash here for a night or two inbetween destinations.
Of course, i know better than anyone else that plans change, and then you make other plans. When initial Jason-related plans fell through Kat decided she’d spend a few extra days here, and then Elise decided that she didn’t really want to go home for more than a day or so, which meant that Kat and Elise were effectively staying in my apartment for the entirety of the week. Add Jason driving in to Philadelphia on four separate days to hang out and Kat’s friend Nika flying in from California yesterday morning, and we had a house chock full of people.
Even with my normal roomies and all of their various guests here at any time, i never feel like this house is full. They are rarely my guests, even if they’re my friends, and so i can float in and out of their conversations on a whim to retreat back to my room and play guitar, blog, or sleep. This was different… not only because all of the guests were mine, but because Lindsay and Erika were largely absent for the rest of the week. The result was the bizarro perception that Kat & Elise were my roommates … they have their own roommate interactions down to a science after six months in the dorms, Elise and i have our own special back and forth banter, and Kat and i have a comically natural ease around each other.
So it was a week of living outside of my life while being directly in the middle of it … a week of inside out. A week of making breakfast and dinner, and calling to say when i might be home, and running to the grocery store because we had drank all of the milk. A week of belting out Ani songs with Kat for hours in a row, and of Elise making wry commentary on … well, on just about every silly little thing i’m prone to do on a day to day basis.
Everything’s back to normal now… everyone’s back from their various Spring Break exploits, sitting in my living room basking in the glow of the credits of Jay and Silent Bob. And, you know, for a minute i was a little bit jealous of the fact that none of them spent the entirety of the week in Philadelphia. But, honestly, i had a vacation from my day-to-day existence too, and i didn’t have to pay, fly, or drive to get to it.
My apologies for the many silences i’ve left you with in the last week — hopefully i’ll be back to normal starting tomorrow. If you can call this normal ;)