You've already missed your plane.

Queen Penelope sits at her loom and weaves. Every night for several years, she sneaks back to the loom and undoes her day's work.

This weekend confirmed what I have always known: it’s time to wake up because the fantasy is really, truly over. I can’t be tugged along anymore, my dear. I can’t be coddled any longer, my friends. It’s difficult to hold onto these moments of clarity but this is what is real.

You wait and you wait and you wait for nothing. It is your hope projected. It’s a trick. It’s a figment of your imagination. There’s no grand, sweeping gesture or even a small one.

WAKE UP. HE IS NEVER GOING TO COME BACK. And it's ok.

He and I dance, so tentatively. We dance and we dance and we dance around each other, never with each other. It's a silly game of chicken. Who will go first this time. I keep learning to give up. It’s ok, I tell myself, over and over. I make myself sick. I want out of this pussyfooted waltz.

Here is the Los Angeles skyline, here is my reflection in the shop window, here are loud shirts coaxing us into the stores. Here are my friends and we are chatting, idly, because it is a beautiful, cold day and the world is hovering at my fingertips.

World, here I come.