travel log day 3 - half a world away
you've often said that the day hasn't started until you've woken up. until the sun rises, until your alarm goes off. staying up until one, two, five in the morning doesn't count as "tomorrow" yet, you just happen to have run overtime on "today" and you're stealing the very existence of tomorrow to do it.
today you woke up at 5:45am, because it was warm and your room has zero airflow, and because it was actually early afternoon in your heart. but you didn't get anything done tonight yet, and your alarm hasn't gone off, and a quick check says the sun hasn't risen yet - so is it really tomorrow? maybe just for a little while it can keep being today. no one else is awake yet, they'll never know what you've done.
you woke up today feeling shockingly decent, for day two of being in another country. getting an actual night's sleep helped. waking up alone in a single bed didn't. it's good that you've been getting some practice in on that the last several months - for a while there was a period of several years where you never slept alone at night, and getting that feeling for the first time here would have sucked.
you got up and made breakfast at some point, went for a walk to catch some pokémon, tried to call your partner back home but ended up just missing her. you said you would try to call later, if you got a good time for it, but you had no idea how likely that was. you did go on a nice walk with your partner who is travelling with you, though.
the area you are staying in has been described as "high crime", or at least high relatively speaking. high crime, it turns out, is a german phrase which means there is more graffiti here, and the signs have a line of what looks like arabic in addition to the usual german and english. this is the same everywhere, really, it's just the language that changes.
you got on the train to go meet some people for lunch. it feels a little silly to travel to germany and then get lunch with a bunch of australians, but the pizza was really good last year, so you're looking forward to it. on the way to the station someone says "we're gonna be late". it feels like an accusation, but you know from him it isn't - "no, we're actually fine on time" feels like you're being defensive, but somehow in your heart it isn't.
you take some photos of your team on the walk. at one point a woman approached you speaking quite pointedly, but of course you can't understand. it turns out she wants to see your photos, to check that you're not taking pictures of her - this is entirely reasonable, but you take efforts not to photograph strangers accidentally and you show her that you haven't changed in this case. she's the first person to ever come up to you and do that. your camera has been getting a couple of looks the last few days that you're not really used to from home. you wonder if you are in fact committing some unknown cultural sin by engaging in your silly little photography here.
you are, of course, falling in love with the cologne metro system again1. you still don't know the word for it - it's a subway sometimes, but when it's above ground is it a train? is it a tram? is "light rail" a term that applies to either of those, or just trains that look particularly tram-like? whatever it is, you need to take it two stops, and it runs about every four minutes. you're so very fine on time. your party are the first ones there.
pizza was, once again, damn good. you met a guy from stockholm, and for a moment you have the fucking insane thought to say "oh, stockholm, i know that place i deliver things there in Pocket Trains". he's working at an australian company right now, which is why he's here at the australian game dev lunch, but he's worked at some big name studios in the past. you listen to a conversation about knowledge sharing in a studio with thousands of developers, and how you make sure the work that everyone is doing is accessible to others - "if someone has invented a wheel in singapore, you need to make sure a different team isn't wasting time in montreal". it's a really interesting conversation, and you want to talk more and ask questions and be a part of it, but something catches your tongue. it's fine, you're used to it, especially around men. besides, there is Good Pizza to eat.
you get out of bed to go pee, and when you get back your partner is lying in bed awake, on her phone. tomorrow, it seems, has snuck up on you.
you leave, and no one really has any idea what to do with the afternoon. you want to go out and Experience The World, but that doesn't particularly bring any suggestions to mind right now. your teammate mentions a pub that a lot of game developers apparently hang out at, and it sounds good, and you can get there from the nearest train stop. so you head there.
along the way you get ice cream. it's really hot today, the warmest forecast for your trip. it's good. you send a photo to your partner back home, the one you were going to call earlier.
why
why has this icecream pic randomly got me
i wanna eat icecream in germany with youuuuu
the holes in your heart ache terribly for a moment. the sting of not managing to call her earlier burns again.
the waiter at the pub comes over and says "hello, what can i get you", in english. you wonder if he heard us talking, or if we just clearly look like people who don't speak german. you get a little embarrassed every time my teammate starts a conversation with someone in english - you get more embarrassed when you have to admit that you don't know german either, but at least you try sometimes, and you're picking up some of the very basics.
you sit down and talk about gamescom tomorrow. you mention that you would like to be more of an active part of conversations than you were last year - this diverges into a long conversation about Being Good at Conversations 103. you learn that asking questions, even inane or meaningless ones, is a good thing. you try to ask more questions in this conversation itself, but unfortunately your mind is still caught on the last talk like this that you were part of. Being Good at Conversations 102: Active Listening; or, Sometimes Saying What Someone Just Said is a Good Thing.
it's a good talk. it helps, you think. your partner talks about it using a model that fits well in your mind, and you become conscious of yourself consciously constructing the sentence about how you are not conscious of the conscious construction. it's a mess. but it helps.
your partner back home says goodnight and goes to bed. you miss the message because you're sitting at a pub drinking a beer with lime juice in it, talking about how to talk.
there's a game dev function on later tonight that sounds interesting. no one else from your state is going. your teammate bemoans the fact that no one from this state ever wants to do anything - but after talking about it, you all come to the conclusion that you're not going either. it's a shame, it sounded really cool, but you should probably talk about what's happening at gamescom tomorrow so you all know what's happening, at least - going to events tonight isn't worth stealing the comfort of you from tomorrow. you all talk about dinner plans, you offer to walk to aldi and your teammate says there's no way you can go alone at 8:30pm. you think it would be fine, but you're definitely running the calculations on if you should change out of your cute dress and into jeans and a hoodie, so you don't overrule him.
the sun is still up on your walk to aldi. there are children in the street and women pushing strollers. you wonder for a moment what you were ever concerned about.
you get home and cook pasta with pesto in it - the same meal you probably would have made back home, though the pesto isn't quite as nice here. you all end up talking until midnight. it helps.
you're up and showered and leaving to catch a train. you've stolen more of today than you really intended to, but you're not done writing yet. today is gamescom! don't go stealing too much.
you're going to bed when your partner back home wakes up and comes online. she's gone through a whole sleep cycle, and this post you were intending to have done by the time she woke up hasn't even been started yet. it feels like the dread of staying up all night accidentally, seeing the world around you waking up and knowing you have run out of time to delay tomorrow's arrival - but it's not that, it's just time zones. it's just the person you love being sixteen thousand kilometres away.
your partner who is three feet away asks if you can push your two single beds together. in that moment you've never wanted anything more. there's still a massive gap in the middle of your constructed bed, and it's too warm to cuddle someone to sleep anyway, but just having her that little bit closer helps.
you wake up at 5:45, because it's warm and in your heart it's early afternoon. you check discord, people say good morning, then tell you to go back to sleep. you would if you could.
your partner posted to their blog last night - it's been a while since you caught up on her posts, so you read a couple of them. it (the post, and your partner) uses a particular way of writing that you associate with someone else - you're not quite sure which of them started doing it first, but it's cute either way. it feels nice to read about her experiences of the day that you haven't started writing about yet, while she's lying asleep right next to you. she's felt so far away recently, beset by problems you don't understand and can't really help her deal with, however desperately you wish you could. paradoxically, the last few days it's felt a little closer. but you don't like taking it so far away from the people - the person? - who's done so much to bring it happiness in the last few months.
when you feel afraid, alone, in need of strength, you dress yourself in the spirits of your loved ones. a jacket owned by your girlfriend, a necklace given to you by your other girlfriend, a shirt2 left at your house by your cat3. but obviously you weren't going to bring someone else's clothes on a trip to another continent, so you can't really do that right now.
you think, for a moment, about the post you intended to write last night, and wonder if you can steal a few moments from the approaching day. not long, tomorrow is an important day, but a few. enough. you wonder if you can dress up in your friends' clothes in a different way, just this once.
you wake up your phone and start writing.
you are, of course, talking about trains in your travel log for the third day in a row.↩
and, honestly, an entire dress sense, though i've been trying to do that a bit less recently bc i was overdoing it for a while there↩
insofar as any cat can be my cat, which is to say i care about her a lot and she is present in my vicinity sometimes, but she's definitely doing her own thing and claiming ownership would be an insult and a lie↩