Wednesday, May. 16, 2012 @ 9:08 pm
Day 11
I've lost track of the days. �Surreal camp life. Work, eat sleep. �A strange place where I need no money to exist, but the irony that everyone is here for money. �
I have to count out the days in my head. �This is day eleven. �I washed my minimal wardrobe and single towel last night, and now I smell like the sheets and the housekeepers and anyone else who is here on a long shift. �
A gentle friendship is growing between me and Matt. �I care about him more than I should. �I want good things for him, and I try to cheer him up when he is grumpy. �We sit side by side every day on the crew bus both too and from the site office. �In any other world we would have overlooked each other, but in the context of a dusty testosterone-fueled resource extraction camp we are drawn to each other. �
I want to remember this and him and recognize that is the first friend that I've made in a long time. �
And later in the month, I will fly home.... home. �To meet with HR and engineers in a skyscraper in the city where I was born. �It's starting to settle in, my heart swells with the thought of going downtown everyday. �The busy streets, the varied faces, the rain falling on the city of glass. � Salt air and snow capped mountains and green lawns year round, and me on the Sky Train going to work. �All of the things that I took for granted, now golden and amazing and beautiful and comforting.
But that's later. �Another seven days of single bed, of Matt's smile over breakfast, of eleven hour days, of late sunsets and northern frozen mornings and dust and servings of rice and over cooked vegetables and lining up to use the phone and two honks to back up and calculating volumes of material and sit ups on my bunk floor and the rustling chatter of the silver pipe insulation fluttering in strips from the above ground camp plumbing and tattooed men looking at me and my eyes downcast and 6:45 am starts and canned pineapple and my down vest and entering my time and dust blowing up so badly that it obscures the sky.
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