But my friend Melissa told me that Turkish Airlines has good food, so okay. On our ten hour flight from Istanbul to New York, our first meal included a fantastic glob of hummus with tomato purée. After eating, we finished the film Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (impressed?), and I fell asleep.
Only an idiot or a person who hates wearing her glasses keeps her contacts in on a flight that length, and I am both of those people. When I woke up, my contacts were glued to my eyes, and I felt that foreboding ache in my head. Jaime asked if I wanted to play a video game on the screens attached to the seats in front of us, and I said, "No, screw you. I have a headache," as I handed him my control to choose the settings and my avatar. After I lost two rounds, I fucked up everyone's world around me and dragged down my 500 lb. carry on bag to look for the ibuprofen I'd packed. I dry swallowed it and immediately decided that I had to vomit.
I don't get migraines often, but when I do, I just have to puke them out. I can't really explain my thought process as I entered the toilet, but I can tell you that I was in terrible pain and used to gagging up just a little bit of bile in times like that. I managed to lock the door behind me and lean over the sink right before what I expected: a dainty bit of clear mucus the likes of which you dab at the corners of your mouth with a hanky afterwards...
...then, I spewed an ungodly amount of vomit not once but twice more into the piss poor excuse for a sink.
"FFFFUUUUUDDDGGGGEE." Only I didn't say fudge.
I began to frantically scoop puke with my cupped hands into the toilet. It looked just like the hummus and tomatoes I'd eaten earlier until the motion censored faucet diluted it with water that filled to the brim.
My shame and fear of telling a flight attendant or that someone was waiting outside the door kept me going far longer than I should have.
I finally washed my arms up to my elbows, folded the door back and explained what had happened to the nearest flight attendant in a language she may or may not have understood.
I padded back to my seat where Jaime, naturally, wanted to know what had taken me so long. When he was done laughing, he said, "Well, you can blog about it. Hey, smell my armpit. I promise it's strong."
In New York, Jaime sailed through customs, as not one but two men expected me to know the job of a customs agent better than they. I ate peanut butter there.
We made it to our eight hour overnight layover in Washington D.C. with the delusion that we would tuck it all in and sleep peacefully through the night under the grand Christmas tree at Reagan like we were presents. Nah uh.
We moved upstairs thinking it would be warmer, but the "beggars" as Jaime likes to call them had the same idea. We couldn't find an empty row of seats, so we strapped our bags together on the floor and took out the toiletry packs the flight attendant had kindly given us before she had to clean up my vomit.
Sometime in the night, I pulled on Jaime's snowpants that I miraculously found in his carry on and managed to sleep with ear plugs, sleep mask and my winter coat for two glorious hours. He wasn't so lucky, as he can't stand to wear a mask and plugs. I think his real problem was the floor waxer that kept driving dangerously close to our heads driven by loudly hablandoing Hispanic men he could understand under the lights and Christmas music that never dimmed and the beggar man who screamed when an employee spilled a drum of some sort of liquid near his things and our bodies.
At 4 a.m., feeling totally refreshed, I headed to the bathroom with my toothbrush and phone. My plan was to take a "woke up like this" selfie, but what looked back at me from the mirror was too horrible to even post on the never ending scroll of shit that is Facebook.
As I was washing up alone, a beggar lady stormed into the bathroom and screamed, "Bitches!" At first I thought she meant me, but I'm only one bitch, so it was okay.
We were the last two souls off the plane at Kansas City; I bounded up the thingy and out of the gate not able to wait another second to run into the arms of my mom and brother. But I had to because they weren't there.
So, we went to collect our bags. They weren't there either.
My cute, little momma finally burst through the doors really not late because we were early, and we had our first hug since I moved back from Barcelona. It was a really good one.
Jaime took a very shitty photo of the moment, but I forgive him because he was trying to keep track of the six bags we used to move our entire lives after he'd flown 7,641 miles over two days to spend the holidays with my family and the rest of his life with me (because he will most likely die first).
And how many times did we fight? Zero. I would call us awesome, but then I remember that we're unemployed and homeless. "Beggars" if you will.
Some highlights from the trip:
If you would like to help your own beggars, you can donate to:
http://nationalhomeless.org/donate/
https://www.justgive.org/donations/help-homeless.jsp
http://www.homelessshelterdirectory.org/cgi-bin/id/article.cgi?article=14
http://nchv.org/index.php/getinvolved/getinvolved/donate/
