the long night before the flight

We wake up on holiday but with 31 hours til my flight out of Christchurch. Go eat crepes in the botanic gardens. Cheesy mushrooms and spinach, sour cherry and chocolate, New Zealand lattes in a bowl. We drive up Mount Cargill and look down at the coast to Waitati, Blueskin Bay the tip of the Otago Peninsula. The bald, grassy hills and the many inlets of ocean. Luke looks up at the tv tower, 'How many students do you reckon come up here at night and try to climb this?' We look at the fencing and the ladder and know how easy it would be and it makes us laugh.

Back to Joan and Chris's and its go go go. Luke and I piling things into the car, Joan offering us food, Christy online trying to think about beds in Christchurch. The person she was hoping to stay with isn't replying on facebook. The conversation around 'who do we know who knows someone's number who we know in Christchurch who will put us up?' gets a little stressful and we leave without knowing where we are going to end up.

It is decided along the way that a late movie and a nap in the car before the flight is the best option and we turn inland to take the scenic route through the mountains. For a while we are in dairy country and the mountains, if they are there, are shrouded in clouds and i'm dissapointed. 'Where are the mountains? I come here to consume the landscape and its all cows!' We get ridiculous, singing made-up songs and bubbling with laughter. When the mountains appear in sunny spots through the clouds Luke alternately sings about them to the tune of old hymns and we cheer them on like a football game.

Its dusk and getting darker as we leave them behind and we pull in for snacks at about 7. Which turns into pizza and a fatal second coffee.

In Christchurch we go straight to Circo so we can look in the windows and they can tell me about life as Circo students. The lights are on. The twins are rehearsing with a whole crew and we stand in the doorway smiling and waiting and Luke and Christy reminisce. When they are done, the twins come over and offer us a bed for the night.

We sit in their loungeroom and talk touring shows in New Zealand, the Butler Show, the Berlin Burlesque, breaking the Guinness World Record for time that 3 people stay squished in a box. We are shown their tree house and their beautiful driftwood furniture and then go to bed in Nele's room.

The three of us in her tiny room at 11:30 at night set an alarm for 4:15am say goodnight and lie quiet for a while. But the coffee has ruined us and soon Christy whispers 'are you guys awake?'. Yes we are. Luke has been choreographing the half-each-gender people in his head, Christy has been re-working Wiped Out, I have been cycling in the south of France: Bezier, Narbonne, Carcasonne over and over again in my head.

We laugh and whisper and it is a sleepover. Christy waves her twitchy coffee feet in the air and we talk seriously about Wiped Out for a while, how to milk the sharks for all they are worth, what needs to happen to the structure to make it work better, improvements to the costumes, how to play better with the audience at the start, how it would work as a street show.

We talk about asking for money in a street show, money and the structure of Asking for Trouble as a business (its so important to be clear about these things and communicate, we all agree earnestly). We talk about relationships and the things its hard to communicate and the ways people make it harder. We comb our pasts and tell stories and ask questions and it is stupidly late at night and we all want more food. But we are happy because its a sleepover and sometimes our voices and laughter come out of whisper-mode for a moment until one of us remembers the rest of the house.

When the alarm goes off it feels like dinner rather than breakfast time. Whole new level of no-sleep driving through Christchurch, checking in the prop-heavy suitcase, sitting in the flourescent airport, eating stupid airport food. Hugging goodbyes at the international departure gate.

Slept the entire flight. Slept again when I got home. Emailed lots of people to say 'read my blog' and now it's time to cook dinner for my housemates. School tomorrow.