Author: goodnightmere

What Happens in Vegas…goes on the internet

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“Ladies and gentlemen, there is no more alcohol,” the flight attendant announced. We were only half way to Sin City, but full of booze and tiny pretzels. It had been a long, cold winter-spring-winter, and as the plane touched down I could literally hear a teary eyed Kelly Clarkson sing, “some people wait a lifetime for a moment like thissss.” When my best friend suggested Vegas for her bachelorette, there were no questions – other than, “how can I afford this?” – and I promptly emailed my credit card and passport number to a lady from Flight Centre Bowmanville. The bride-to-be did all the planning, I just sat there refreshing my credit card statement, justifying every expense leading up to the trip with a healthy I-worked-two-Saturdays-in-a-row-therefore-I-deserve-this mentality. I don’t deserve anything. What I needed was a break and two miniature bottles of prosecco, thank you. By the time we checked into our hotel, I was both drunk and hungover from the sheer enormity that is the Las Vegas strip. Everything in Vegas is big. The casinos, …

Episode 2: Moving On

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The three of us are a team. We stick together through the puke and the pain and the mess of it all. But tonight the team is broken and I’m afraid it’s my fault.

Moving On

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It’s two in the morning and my Dad and I are screaming at each other in the light of the bathroom. The other end of the hallway is dark and quiet, but on our side we declared war. My Mom, tired of listening to us, has gone to sleep in the basement – a house divided. We never fight, but judging by the way we are now, you would think we’re professionals. A flood of mascara dyed tears run down my face and sting my eyes. The tears make it hard to see him, but his words make it impossible. This isn’t him. This isn’t the man who ran behind my little two-wheel bike, the only one I trusted to pull out my loose teeth, the hero who caught my puke in his bare hands when I was sick in a fancy hotel room. Ahh, the joys of parenthood. Imagine loving someone so much you would catch their puke in your bare hands? “You would do the same for your kid,” they always tell me. I gag at the thought …

A (Very Short) Love Story

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My warm face pressed into the backseat window, it was the only thing that made my mind, spinning with thoughts and several Moscow Mules, go still. I looked at him sitting in the passenger seat where he scrolled through his phone to find my favourite country song. He turned around to look at me and smiled. I smiled back, then turned away, my breath fogging up the cold glass as I sang along. He asked me to be his girlfriend earlier that night and we lived happily ever after. Jks, we broke up six days later. “I don’t want you to hold me back,” I told him, after my friends left and the house was quiet. “I don’t want you to hold me back,” he replied, his blue eyes meeting mine. I didn’t turn away this time, I was getting better at the whole eye contact thing. He explained that relationships aren’t about holding each other back and, although my cognitive skills were impaired, I understood. “We have to tell each other everything and always be honest,” he insisted, …

Lost in Translatopn

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My heavy feet dragged their way through Tokyo Narita Airport, my brain was still somewhere over the Pacific Ocean – in the plane’s bathroom where I mistook the mouthwash for soap and scrubbed my hands with it – and would hopefully catch up with me later. It had been a long flight and the free Singapore Slings seemed like a good idea at the time and why is this soap burning my hands? “Konbanwa!” The lady behind the front desk said as I walked through the automatic doors. “Konbanwa!” I repeated back to her like a drunk parrot. I hath not known what I said, nor where I was. I squinted under the bright lights and nodded while she spoke words I would never understand. Then she bowed and handed me a locker key and a bag containing slippers, a tooth brush, and a giant grey night shirt. She placed her pointer finger to her lips, then to a door with  a “quiet, please” sign on it. I bowed back to her, opened the door and entered the …

Forever Day

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As the the morning sun shone over Nairobi National Park, we stuffed our faces with breakfast, stuffed the trucks with bags, stuffed our faces with second breakfast and began our journey into the wild – a road trip split up over two days. Because one does not simply walk to the Maasai Mara. I watched Nairobi’s concrete jungle get smaller and smaller in the review mirror until the skyscrapers looked like towers for ants. Ahead of us, The Great Rift Valley waited patiently for our arrival. What’s a few hours, when you’ve been around some 25 million years. This 6,400 km long crack in the Earth’s surface has stacked up quite the resume over those millions of years. It reaches from Northern Syria to Mozambique in East Africa, almost broke the continent in two, and has some of the World’s deepest fresh and salt water lakes. Africa’s tallest mountains call it home, Astronauts say it’s the most significantly visible detail on Earth from space, it’s lined with active and semi active volcanoes, abundant wildlife, horizonless …