April 18, 2019

My dearest,

You can’t believe how cold I am. It’s not that, you tell me, the temperature’s not yet freezing. But the wind chill, you reason, that’s what’s getting you.

I must be nodding in agreement like the dutiful husband I am, except I’m shaking like a tree so I doubt you’d notice.

You acquiesce to us running back into the coffee shop, a co-working space owned by a local telco or utilities company, we aren’t sure which. Isn’t strange and wonderful that we make guesses when we abroad based on what we find familiar back home? The font, the colour red, is it the same in Argentina and Chile the way it is in Malaysia and Thailand?

You order us some coffees while I warm up, shed layers, relax into the sofas. Part of the bliss is knowing we are on vacation while others around us are working. It isn’t schadenfreude, not exactly, but a deep and sudden sense of gratitude.

That we have time to take time off. That we have space to get out of the cold and warm up and maybe space out a little. That we are here, thousands of miles from home, and still home in that we built more than 11 years ago when we found each other.

I may have been shivering earlier, outside with the Austral gales blowing and us so close to Antarctica, but so long as I’m with you, baby, I’m never cold.

Yours, ever and always.