Bleeding Fiction

This past Wednesday was my last day at work. It was hard for me to go, I won't pretend it wasn't. I worked an interesting job with excellent people that let me go to distant places and feel as if I was making the world a slightly better place. If I ever have another job as emotionally, experientially and spiritually rich as my job at InterExchange, I'll count myself a lucky man. But still, it was time to move on. My GRE scores were about to expire.

I've been silent here because I've spent every day from last Wednesday to now engaged in a decadent display of sybaritic crapulence. I was feted with wine and rare hallucinagenic slugs, I cavorted with pleasure queens from a dozen countries. It was a show of debauchery worthy of certain members of the French and Italian nobility. Or at least it might have been, if tales of those nobles' exploits had been wild exaggerations brought on by fever.

My now-former co-workers gave me a quiet sushi dinner with the closest of them, a nice card to remember them by and a few email addresses to keep in touch. Lena gave me the gift of her company over the past few days and the flu. When I said I wanted to spend my time in bed, I didn't mean crippled by fever. When I said I wanted to play doctor, I didn't mean I wanted Lena to bring me advil and tea.

Again, I exaggerate. Lena did give me a little cold and fever, an illness dredged up from the slimy deeps of Sleazeside, and it's slowed me down a little, but that's about all. The worst was that I missed hanging out with Aaron and crew on Saturday night, something I'll try to make up before I leave. Lena and I did the regular run of things, shopping and movie-watching and shooting pool and eating and such, and on Sunday evening I took her off to the airport for her flight home. When she left, she didn't take the flu with her.

I've got a few days of quietude left to me, days in which to pack my life into tiny boxes in preperation for transport to a far away place. In terms of steps, this is probably the biggest I've ever taken. I'm abandoning every element of security I've got in order to try something new and do something different. It's daunting, but exciting. Let's get packing.