October 11 T1149 Orlando
[excerpt]

Last night while high and drunk I suddenly remembered that at the Düsseldorf airport a month after she died I hallucinated seeing Dr. F. I’d arrived from New York and hadn’t slept for nearly 36 hours and was waiting for my parents to arrive from Houston for us to all transfer together to Munich. It was early in the morning, maybe around 7:30am, and while looking for a place to sit down and wait in the terminal I settled on a bench facing a flower shop that was just opening for the day. A woman was setting up the flowers and trimming the stems and I was fixated on her thinking it was Dr. F. I was delirious with exhaustion (I couldn’t sleep on the plane) and was so happy to see she was still alive. 

On that trip I’d also made up my mind to come out to my parents a second time and planned to say that if they didn’t acknowledge it then I wouldn’t come home for Christmas so they’d know I was serious. (That got derailed thanks to my sister’s daughterly allegiance superseding her sibling allegiance. Thanks, Jen.) I forgot that this was the other big decision I made after she died aside from leaving my job. I don’t know what about her death emboldened me. I do remember wanting to have this conversation with my parents in Germany because it was neutral ground— neither New York nor Houston—which is perhaps the only time in modern history Germany has been neutral.