From our office Christmas party, I arrived some half an hour before midnight at a favorite meet-up place and decided to text some friends for a bite or whatever since I didn't want to go home yet. Only one of them was up for a late night so we decided to go to a coffee shop for supposedly a quick chat.
The Queen of England bought tea while I had hot chocolate. From 12mn to 6am, we talked about life and Game of Thrones and Ricky Lee and people and other stuff. And she told me some more things about her recent writing stint, her one tricky pool of complicated ideas, the people at the office, plans for the future (or lack thereof). I told her of my personal woes, my first Sandman volume!, my restlessness about my career (or lack thereof), my longing for a familiar company.
You'd think not being with each other would have made us run out of things to talk about. But I guess it's the way with friends like her I've come to make and keep. I (and thankfully they do, too) always take the effort to see each other together, whether for a movie, a thrift bookstore date or just random meet-ups over coffee and tea. Yeah, I might have missed out on some things from the party, but it's something I would gladly trade for another six-hour senseless banter with a kindred (ghei) soul who knows what makes me tick, and whose quirks I have loved dearly for the past couple of years.
