On our second night we stayed in a hostel farther toward the outskirts of town. We took a few hours to digest the sandwiches and compile slutty outfits. Then we headed back toward the center area, where it didn't take long before we'd crashed a pub crawl and were flirting shamelessly with the staff running it. Bonne was particularly enamored with one shaggy haired Irishman. We joke about how her type is tall and likely to be homeless within ten years, and this guy fit the bill. Later correspondence with him proved that he was illiterate to the point where emails read like a haiku, but anyway, Bonne was insistent that we follow them to every bar on the pub crawl.
I had lost enthusiasm after the only staff member I thought was cute left with a headache. A perfectly charming Australian kept striking up conversation, but I wasn't interested, that is, until he finally gave up and I later saw him talking to someone else.
"Maybe he was cute," I thought. Typical! Soon I had inner-voiced myself into my standard self-pitying state, where the only cure is to go home for a good cry and some binge eating. When I've reached this point of quiet belligerence, it usually means that I was supremely drunk and optimistic at one point, but have stopped drinking long enough to let angry feelings fester, and mistake them for sobriety since angry is my natural state. Which creates situations like the one where I thought it would be perfectly logical to march up to Bonne, tell her that I was leaving, and could I have the room key please? We only had one. And our flight to Madrid left the next morning at 8:30 am. We hadn't packed, and we had no idea how we were getting to the airport, and neither of us had cell phones in case anything went wrong, but I was assuming nothing would go wrong, that Bonne would come back that night at some point and we would drag ourselves up at the crack of dawn to do what needed to be done to make our flight on time.
And then it was 3:30 am and Bonne had still not returned. 4:00. 4:30. 5. I kept waking up, checking the clock, having miniature bouts of panic, and then falling back to sleep again. All the worst case scenarios of the situation haunted my dreams, from missing the flight to filing a missing persons report with the Dutch politie. At six o'clock I awoke for good, folding up my clothes, brushing my teeth, zipping and packing my toiletry bags and then sitting, waiting, on the bed. If we did not leave by 6:30, I was sure we would miss the flight. And at 6:25 I heard a pounding of feet up the stairs, and Bonne flung the door open, make-up smeared, grass in her hair, and what appeared to be the beginnings of bruises on her leg.
"Holy shit," she said.
It would be indecent of me to tell you the full story, although it's a great one. It accounts for the grass but not the bruises, but the important part is that Bonne awoke by the grace of some urgent internal alarm clock, at 6:05 in a hostel far across town. She grabbed her purse and RAN. And at 6:45 we were in a cab bound for the Vueling terminal, with only one absurdity en route when our cab driver suddenly pulled into the breakdown lane under a bridge, and got out to tinker with the wheel. Paris Hilton's "Stars are Blind" was playing on the radio.
"Our lives," said Bonne.
And that was the end of that miniature era, as we were on to Madrid.
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