On the last day of the conference, a few fellow conference goers asked me about where I was staying. We were talking over lunch at an affordable Chinese place not too far from the fancy hotel that served as the conference venue.
“It’s a hostel that’s filthy and smells like pot,” I responded. “And it’s a mile downhill from here. And for a floor of twenty plus rooms, there’s one shower, one toilet, and one bathroom whose lights don’t work, making it useless. The only way I ever shower or use the bathroom is if I’m up at an odd hour of night. Which I am. Because I’m still jetlagged.”
“Ugh,” one of them grimaced. “Sounds awful.”
“It’s not, really,” I shrugged. “It was the cheapest private room I could find, so I wasn’t expecting much. And the guy who runs the place? He’s awesome and makes it all worth it. I love talking to him.”
“Sounds like someone has a crush,” one of them teased. I rolled my eyes.
“The dude’s like sixty.”
“An old man crush, then.”
I struggled to explain, then, how much I relish it when I meet another person able to have random conversations unbound by the tethers of reality and preexisting social constructs. I tried to demonstrate by starting to talk about dragons. One of my companions joined that conversation briefly before it devolved into a discussion of whether a dragon would melt Elsa (from Disney’s Frozen) or Elsa would freeze the dragon. (I maintain that the dragon would melt Elsa.)
I was really looking forward to talking with Ricardo* again. Every conversation we’d had had been so much fun.
So, of course, the day that I left, all our interactions were run of the mill. I took my suitcase down to check out and store it in the office just as it was opening. I had gone to sleep too early the day before and had woken up at midnight and been unable to go back to sleep. I probably looked a bit like a zombie.
By the time I came back from the post-conference class to reclaim my suitcase, I was feeling lightheaded with exhaustion and weak with hunger. I think we may have had a short discussion in which the suitcase was a hostage, but I don’t quite remember.
It was an underwhelming goodbye to what had been a very entertaining acquaintanceship.
*Not his real name.