These are a few of my favourite things

I am so tired today. I've worked for 11 hours almost straight through, and although me in residency could do this and bounce back and go to work the next day, me 7 months out of residency is so thankful that I have the day off tomorrow to catch up on work. I don't know how I ever managed this.

But I can't go to sleep like this, not with the taste of medicine still lingering in my brain. I need to write, and thus shift a gear in my head to that of a more malleable sort.

Before I went to bed yesterday night, I opened my notes app and typed a bunch of gibberish. It is gibberish because upon reading it the next morning, I didn't really understand what I was trying to say. It was titled: a list of my favourite things. I did it because I dreaded going into work today, and it made me feel a certain way. And based on a particular movie musical, making a list of my favourite things is always the solution to when one feels that certain kind of way. So I will try again tonight. Here goes, another midnight project:

A list of my favourite things

1. the buzz of airports, hellos and goodbyes blending together into one indistinguishable blur. the arrival gate, the departure gate. is it possible to simultaneously love both and neither, leaving me utterly perplexed as to whether i even like airports at all. the departure gate at toronto pearson is my favourite place in toronto, because it signals the imminence of not-toronto. my least favourite: the departure gate at paris charles de gaulle. although the sight of flying into cdg is second to none. whether it is a week away in spain, a month in florence, four years in toronto, flying back into paris is always the same brand of grounded anticipation. it's an oxymoron, but there are no other words for it, it is the way i feel about about charles de gaulle, about airports, about france, about anywhere that feels like second nature when it's not meant to.

2. summer. how it already feels like a lifetime ago. eyes closed, the sun, warmth, the way the world looks through tinted sunglasses, a first bite into icy watermelon, the feeling of digging your toes in hot sand until you reach the firm cool ground, the wind through sea salt hair and pruney fingertips, cotton candy skies, every perfect evening breeze. i have forgotten summer so much that I even want to add sunburnt shoulders to the list. on long winter nights, even sunburns carry a certain romance, a token of a long summer's day well spent. the rare sunburns that you don't notice until someone else taps you on the shoulder and points it out, the last remnants of peeling tenderness just about fading into perfect hues of bronze.

3. tenderness. the word itself. how I have just realized now that it is both pain and softness. very different meanings. a tender wound. a tender gaze. one hurts and one heals. or perhaps the other way around, depending on the depth of the wound, depending on who is doing the gazing. tenderness. do it's two meanings so different somehow bleed together in some universe, existing simultaneously, such that you cannot have one without risking the other. the potential of pain, the promise of familiarity. when scott fitzgerald penned the words, tender is the night. what ever did he mean? i don't know, i've never read it. but in my mind i picture him holding the night in cupped palms, as it languidly seeps through his fingers like sand. it means i possess it and i don't, it means it's seemingly impenetrable cloak is fickle and could slip through on a whim. there is pleasure in this delicate process.

4. sad beautiful things. mostly still beautiful, and sad only because it must end. even better, beautiful moments that you realize are beautiful even before it ends. perhaps there is another stranger in the room and they quietly realize it too. the silent look you give each other, as if you are both hiding a million dollar secret, pursed between closed lips. i already keep a dozen of them pressed tightly between the pages of my old diary, because i cannot bear to throw them out. alas this is how nostalgia is born out sad beautiful things. i find an old receipt in my pocket, and it reminds me of sad beautiful places, and memories, and at my worst, people. it reminds me that we do not always need reminders of sad beautiful things.

That's it, it's a list of 4 not because I only love 4 things, but because I am too sleepy to love any more things tonight before it starts to sound like gibberish again the next morning. Did the plan work though? Did it take my mind off work? Yes. Make me feel more lighthearted? Not sure. I do feel odd reading this list over again. Wondering now if I should have named it "a list of the things I miss" instead.