Transamerica Claire Style - Part I

You know when you feel as though you haven’t quite broken up with someone enough? When you have cried and wailed and attached yourself, limpet like, to their leg as they tried to leave you, but still, you sensed that deep down there was a teeny bit more heartbreak left to be wrung out of the situation and damned if you weren’t going to wring it?

My very first sojourn to Canada ended rather abruptly when it turned that the Canadian government wasn’t keen on granting visas for foreigners who wanted to fart about and try to make movies – there are, after all, more than enough Canadians farting about and trying to make movies, so I was out on my ear. This all happened so abruptly, however, that my family had already booked and paid for a trip to visit me, in three months’ time – in the country I wasn’t allowed to live in any more. Also around this time, my boyfriend and I were not getting on terribly well and had discussed breaking up – but, in the end decided that it would be a better idea to travel around the U.S. in a tiny car and tent together for three months at which time I would head back to Canada to meet up with my family. Brilliant? Or not.

That lasted a couple of weeks after which point we decided that the breaking up idea in fact had been the right one, and I took a train to Boston to stay with my aunt until it was time to sneak back into the Great White North. Except that a couple of months later, we decided that, in fact, we’d better just see each other one more time to make sure that the breaking up idea was the one to go for. I jumped on a train in Washington D.C. (after visiting another aunt) for a day and a half’s journey after which time I would have almost 2 days in Chicago to sort things with old what’s his face then jump on a plane to Seattle and get a bus up to Vancouver where my family would be waiting and bob would be my uncle.

Things started to go a bit pear shaped when the train pulled out of the station in D.C. – and promptly began to reverse. It turned out that there had been a crash (no one was hurt so I was allowed to be annoyed) on the track to Chicago, so we had to head down into Virginia to get on to another track. Virginia, it turns out, is ever such a pretty state, but being in a bit of a hurry to get to Illinois probably isn’t the best circumstance in which to appreciate it. Nearly 20 hours later, at an interminable wait outside Cleveland, with my precious time in Chicago ticking away, I’d had enough and burst into tears. A very sweet elderly couple who were due to get off in Cleveland kindly asked me if I was okay (which was somewhat a redundant question given that I was heaving with sobs and struggling to catch my breath while drowning in snot, but undoubtedly well intentioned.) I was of course terribly British about it and said that I was just fine, thank you for asking. When the couple got off the train, the old man handed me a bag of pretzels, which I tried to hand back as I don’t like pretzels, but he told me to keep it anyway. Not wishing to appear rude, I did so – and as the train pulled out of the station I glanced at the bag, and realized that he had put a $10 note in it for me. I was quite stunned by such a random and incredibly kind gesture from a stranger – although I would love to know what he thought I was crying about!

Upon finally reaching Chicago, a couple of hours chatting with the man confirmed that yup, breakup still definitely on. Unfortunately, we came to that conclusion with a good two hours to go before I had to be at the airport for my flight to Seattle, and there was no one else to drive me. So we had lots of fun sitting in stony silence in my cousin’s apartment, with me occasionally choking back sobs because damned if I was going to cry (more) in front of him. The silence was occasionally punctuated by me grandly pronouncing that I didn’t want him to drive me to the airport, in fact I never wanted to see him again, and he would ask if I had the money for a taxi to the airport and I would huff that no, I didn’t, and he would reply that then he would drive me and I would snort ‘fine then’ and we’d go back to silence and choked sobs.