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Sunday night. Everybody’s at the wedding now so I have a quiet few hours to myself at the house and I am luxuriating in them. After five days of vacation I am starting to feel that I am ready to go back home, but I’m not sure what exactly is behind this desire. I definitely don’t miss work and I’m not homesick. I think I am a little antsy to do something other than just walk and lounge around, maybe, and be in control of my life a little more (when to eat, where to go, what to do, who to see). Writing has helped keep me sane; it exercises my brain and gives me a good outlet for my restlessness.

Earlier today my cousin and aunt came by to visit Carmel with us, which was … okay. Carmel is cute and all and there are some little alleyways to explore but there’s not nearly as much to see or do as I’d hoped. What does exist is too expensive and feels too contrived, too manicured. The beach is nice — the sand smooth and water cold and clear.

The stores were underwhelming to begin with; with my cousin in tow and the secondhand embarrassment he brings, I barely browsed at all. I survived the five hours with him by picking my battles and conserving my energy. My go-to strategies are pretending I don’t hear him, walking far ahead or behind (best used with the first strategy), and answering his questions with a shrug or “I don’t know”. I promise I try my best; he just goes through my already small supply of patience with dynamite. Once he gets an idea in his head he’s a dog with a bone — he won’t stop talking about it until he gets what he wants. Around noon he got it in his head that he wanted lunch when no one else was hungry. After we acquiesced to going where he wanted to go he complained that we weren’t walking quickly enough to the restaurant for his liking. Then he had the audacity — after pouting to get his way and not bothering to ask anyone else what they wanted — to ask why nobody else was eating or enjoying themselves. He also ordered the most expensive thing on the menu, ate only half of it, and then told his mom to let someone else (i.e., my parents) pay.

When he whined, “could you guys go any slower?” for the third time, Mom slowed down to fall in step with me, put her arm around my shoulder, and whispered, thank god you didn’t turn out like this. I would have laughed if I weren’t in stunned silence over his lack of manners and self-awareness. If he were my little brother the two of us probably would have murdered him a long time ago.

Now seems like a good time to share these topical postcards I picked up this week.

If anything, spending time with my cousin has made me realize how much I like everyone else in my life and how grateful I am that they have been raised right.

This is a friend I’ve made here that I am loath to leave. He comes by multiple times a day and stares at me through the sliding glass doors until I go outside. We sit together in the sun and he purrs up a storm while I scratch behind his ears. So much cat hair ends up on me (my sleeves, my pants, even my face and collar when he climbs on top of me) when the wind blows I shed too. A cat taking a liking to you is the best feeling in the world, even if it is a friendly one to begin with.

I can see Misu from back then sometimes when I go about the city. I can see him waiting for the bus, trying to find his way around, seeing the city properly for the first time and falling in love with it. Every time this happens I feel a twinge of (hm, what’s the feeling) pity? yearning? for him and I have to remember not to dwell too long, lest my image of the past become too rosy and warm. I have always been the type to long for things even when I know they won’t do me any good, and I always worry about this longing distorting my memories and making them seem better than they were in reality. I have little written record of how I was feeling back then (and even less the further back in time you go), and often I wonder if the days were really as happy or sad or stressful as I remember them to be. How can I know now? And how can I be sure my memory of them isn’t tainted by what came after?

In the interest of knowing the answers to these questions in the future I’ll say now that solo traveling can get lonesome at times. I haven’t had a proper conversation with someone I know for two full days now, and while that doesn’t feel like a long time, I can feel it taking a toll on my emotional health. I have done this for much, much longer before, and I wonder if I also felt this way too and just don’t remember it.

*   *   *

I am spent beyond words. My Fitbit is telling me my readiness score is a 33 out of a possible 100. (This is Low, apparently.) After nearly walking a marathon over the last three days I hardly needed it to remind me that I need rest, though what does surprise me is how low the score actually is. It occurred to me yesterday that on vacations I am essentially trading my physical health for emotional and spiritual health. This has been the norm for me on vacations for as long as I can remember; the ten most physically taxing days of my life surely all come from vacation. I wish it didn’t have to be like this, but my brain never lets me. A staycation feels like a waste of precious time off; if I go somewhere, not pushing myself to see and do everything I want feels like a waste of airfare and/or lodging. Five miles becomes ten becomes fifteen and then we’re right back where we started.

*   *   *

Saw The Cousin™️ yesterday. He’s fifteen, a freshman in high school, stll thin as a beanstalk but almost as tall as me now. His voice has begun its descent into the lower registers.

I thought the years would have dampened his truly exceptional gift for gab but his mouth is prodigious as ever. He is aggressively talkative. Words tumble out of his mouth with spittle and specks of food before he can even finish enunciating them. He asks me something about myself and before I've finished answering he's pointed out the model of the airplane that just flew overhead and its probable origin, the original question all but forgotten.

There is an admittedly small part of me that can overlook him talking over everyone and completely dominating every conversation, and that part of me finds his verve endearing (or maybe admirable is a better word). I'd even go so far as to say that I like him. But can I say that if I leave every interaction we have utterly exhausted? Is there a part to liking someone beyond how you feel when you're with them? The number of people that I've liked in my life that didn't make me feel the best tells me that my answer to this question is a resounding yes. Do you feel this way too?

The few times we've seen him, the conversation in our family afterwards always centers on why he is the way he is — why he has the attention span of a squirrel dumpster-diving behind a Dunkin', why he's so insistent on making his voice heard on every topic, why he doesn't seem to pick up on any of our social cues as we cower before his verbal onslaught. (When he talks to me I am literally stunned into shock and silence. Because I can barely keep up with his pace of conversation I speak even more slowly to buy myself time to think, and he gets around this by interrupting and talking over me.) I am certain that the majority of his personality can be chalked up to genetics, as certain as I am that a stricter parenting style like Mom's would stifle his unruliness. The last time I saw him he was ten or eleven and we all agreed that things would probably get better with time. Now he's fifteen. Is there still hope? I know people can change a lot in the years after fifteen — I certainly did — but I feel like my nature was already pretty set by then.

I’ve left each of my interactions with my cousin with a few things: a raging headache; a disbelief that this boy is related to me by blood; a begrudging acknowledgment of the relative effectiveness of my mother’s parenting style; and, most significantly, a strong appreciation for V, who is pretty much the antithesis of my cousin W in every way. V is selfless, easygoing, and reserved in a way I often take for granted until I spend time with W and then realize that it could have been so, so much worse. I called V afterwards to tell him about it on the drive south. Naturally he did not have much to say about the newest horror story but I wish he would have been there to see it.