Phantomwise, if it were so.

I passed out last night. So what's new. A combination of jet-lag and general madness. I dreamed of Andrew all last night. I was trying to contact him (in the dream), but my mobile had fucked up because I tried to wash a giant crayfish at some point, and my phone got wet in the process.

When I woke up, he was in my head. He filled it up completely, and I couldn't stop thinking about him. I just stared at the ceiling and thought about him.

It was late in the morning, and Dan came to my side and sat up beside me and we talked about... stuff. Actually he asked me if I was alright, to which I said I was fine, but of course I wasn't. I felt terribly homesick. We sat about in silence for awhile, and then he said, "I think Andrew misses you". I was like "O.O, how do you know?" He told me "Facebook." I went to check it, and Andrew had left me this post on my wall:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The... hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Izzymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

And I started crying. I don't know since when I got like that, before 2010, I almost never cried. But I also never cared. If you keep telling yourself everyone else is a selfish bastard, and no one cares, then you can avoid crying. But the last couple of years have proven to me that people do care, and that there was nothing wrong with feeling empty, and nostalgic, and like you were missing something, and that there are awesome people in your life that you miss...

I replied with an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's Epilogue of Through the Looking Glass. Being me (I love ambiguous endings with a predisposition towards a positive interpretation) I twisted it from this sad thing to something a little more cheerful :o)

A boat, beneath the April sky
Lingering onward dreamily,
In the evening of goodbye.

Soon will dawn that sunny sky;
And echoes linger though memories die;
The summer rains will bring July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Past shadows moving under skies
Under lids of our slumbering eyes,

And in a Wonderland we lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as April passes by,

Ever drifting down the stream,
Lingering in the golden gleam,
Lives that stretch forth along parallel themes.  

In any case, I was talking to Andrew and trying to persuade him to come to Balogna in May, when the Fixer will be there hanging around his friend's place and I will go and visit just because I can and it will cost 29 Euros, and he said "Aren't we going to go to Malkom in July?"