My Discount Day

I have one very good, very lifelong friend on board, who has I fear been growing weary of the woe-be-gone me that has returned to this ship. I can’t blame him; I’ve grown weary as well. But because he is my friend, he is giving me a few free passes which I am gratefully accepting because I don’t generally know what else to do. I’ve never been in such a state and I never expected for my world to be so completely turned upside down but I think sometimes you just hit a saturation point of how much loss you can handle in any given time and I did and it changed me. But today was a day to let those things go. It was not a romantic day hanging with myself, which is good because I really wasn’t ready for a romantic day to myself anyway. What I was ready for was a non-romantic day with my dear friend. So off we went, two peas in a pod of sublime ridiculousness. You see, he is one of the people who I know I am blessed to have found, another likeminded soul who finds adventure in the everyday though our everyday currently resides on the ocean so it is perhaps not as mundane as could otherwise be. He is indeed one of my most treasured friends.

Now our port of call is known for a few things. First is the cable car ride which I was up for but he was not being that his fondness of heights rather resembles a day in the pits of hell at the cost of eighteen euro a piece, second is the basket ride where you travel down a huge hill pushed in a basket by men in silly hats rather like a toboggan sans the snow, ice and toboggan, which he was up for and I was not, not because I was afraid but rather because I am cheap! So we compromised and skipped them both for a negotiated narrated taxi ride around the island during which we would stop at the various locations to take pictures of ourselves doing the things we refused to spend money to do. Our cable car was a swing set we happened up and our basket ride a wooden crate we pinched off a pier, building the stories in our minds that we would later retell of the “discount” tour we had happened upon. I laughed until my face hurt and I was again for a time my old familiar self; scratch that, my young familiar self. I suppose it is all about the people around us and the adventures we discover, not the things we leave behind. The past shapes the present, the present sets the stage for the future. We just have to leave ourselves open for a future of opportunities, not regrets. Perhaps I will be ready for a romantic date with myself sometime sooner rather than later but for now, I’m just giving myself permission to live in the moment and let things go.