It was late, and our words were quiet. The house slept around us, snoring noises emanating from the various rooms."It's not so much about turning thirty," I said. "I've earned this number, and I have no reason to hide from it, but…"

"The round number makes it easy and natural to take stock of your life."

I whispered agreement. Conversations like these don't often take place during the light of day; they are the omnipresent thoughts, but the last to be voiced. First in, but last out; only after the chitchat and the catching-up conversations are exhausted do the soul-searching words tumble out as the friend's hand reaches for the metaphysical doorknob of sleep.

I write this here knowing that he will see it, knowing that I'll dread the moment he comes home, wanders off to his computer, and eventually spots these words, because it'll likely happen while I'm here. None of these words will surprise him, but it's the first time I've acknowledged any of them openly.

To you, love, from across a timezone, my voice and my words to you.

Eight years married, ten years together; a third of my life now wrapped up in your presence. We've said this every year: it's not the ceremony that holds true importance, it's the everything that comes after that makes a marriage, and you, dear, I have loved more than anyone else I have known in my entire life.

I may fly away, but I am aware, oh so keenly aware, of where home is.

Here's to life. Yours, mine—and most importantly, ours.

Home soon.

When we drove by, it was tantalizing. "Right over there, over that wall, there's the beach," Gareth said. It was dark, and all I could see was a vast expanse of nothing that might, or might not, have held shifting shimmers of reflected light from the streetlights around us.

Gareth gunned it, and we were gone. The water would have to wait for the next morning.

You cannot take the measure of a place without experiencing it with your own senses. I do not know this place, not yet; I know bits and pieces of roads and intersections, and the interior of a gym rather well, and the photos on the walls of this house best of all. It's been a long time since I've done this sort of thing, traipsing cross-country to a place that I've never seen before in order to drop out of my life for a week or so at a time.

I've been disoriented.
It's improving.

I've had Talking Heads in, well, my head for most of the week. I started the trip with "Once In A Lifetime" and sang along until I had most of it.

"And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go?"
— Talking Heads

South and east, I think, past the sprawl and congestion of Atlanta to the sprawl and congestion of yet another place, but one that has something I haven't seen in quite some time. Ocean.

Into the blue again, indeed.

Over the course of the holiday weekend, Jeff and I paused for a while to watch the space shuttle launch. I watched for both prurient and practical reasons. Not only did I want the shuttle to lift off safely, but I also was beginning to exhibit a senior citizen's "get off my lawn" opinion where the shuttle-gawking RV nation was concerned.

I'm at T minus seven.