The truck was silent at first but that was to be expected. It didn’t take him long to carry on as if nothing had happened, but this isn’t new and what happened isn’t new so I carry on as usual as well. He planned what he was going to say as he listened, being as inconsiderate in conversation as he usually is and I remember where I come from.

We arrive and I think he starts to make a move to grab my bag, I tell him I got it and I give a quick goodbye and I don’t hug him or shake his hand. His attempt to get my bag might have been an attempt to make the goodbye an apology. I regret not letting this happen.

I have evolved as a business traveler. I spot the inexperienced gaze at the touch screen ticket kiosks confused.  At the security line I get behind a man in typical business nomad garb. I observe his speed and believe at first that I’ve made the right choice. I detect a nervousness as he removes his belt and I know this doesn’t bode well. When he asks the TSA agent if he had to remove his belt, I know I had chosen poorly. I step around him and no one notices.

The six AM flights are the hardest for me the sleep on. I’d gotten maybe three hours of interrupted sleep the night before, but here on this Southwest 737, my eyes are wide open. I watch Houston wake up below me, ants in cars making their morning commute as I make mine. The sun rises on the east side. Uninhibited gold blazing atop dark clouds. The west side stays asleep as if the plane is a barrier between night and dawn. The pilot’s landing is smooth to the point that people sleeping stay that way.

St. Louis is how I left it. Cold and washed out, like everything falls through a grey filter. I declined a rental car this week and opted out for public transit. The wind bites through me on the elevated platform. The light rail arrives on time and it’s not much warmer. It speeds through the dilapidated outskirts of downtown. I see a junk yard, flattened masses of former cars stacked like cards or flapjacks. A man huddles burning wood around them like a single solemn guard, the fire warding off the oncoming grey. I see dirt fields, and dirt fields, and brambles thick to the point of becoming a wholly solid mass. I see graffiti. I see good graffiti and I see bad graffiti and I often see both juxtaposed. The phrase on a storage unit: “While you sleep…(a few feet away)…WE CREEP.”

Local citizens enter and exit like automatons, all emitting a lugubrious aura. So many faces I’ll never see again and they interest me the most, all going somewhere but in my mind, nowhere at all. All cold and unhappy. Do they think the same about me? This strange and unimportant out of towner on equally unimportant adventures? No, they think nothing of me.

An update: Yes, it’s been a long time since my last entry. I felt compelled this morning though. Hopefully it’s a trend. There was so much going on that it was hard to keep up, so I decided just to start at where I am right now. I’ll give the cliff notes version. 2012 started with a bang, I hope it keeps the same pace. I had dinner with my boss of bosses in Austin and it was great. Tim. L is leaving the company. I turned 21 on the 16^th. I spent it in St. Louis with Tim S, who I had an amazing conversation about my future with. And life goes on. Of all the things that have happened and are happening, I’m still just trying to stay grounded and tell myself that it’s not a dream and it’s reality and the things I do actually matter. When I can realize this, I will truly be happy.