John Howard Griffin Died of Diabetes, not Skin Cancer.

Into the flood again, the same old trip it was back then. So I made a big mistake? Try to see it once my way...

For good or ill, I am back. Seems like an age since I sat down here to write about my thoughts, feelings and experiences. Journalistic/paternalistic.

Drove to Auckland last Wednesday morning. Spent the day in the car and the evening out drinking. A night beyond comprehension or explanation. I will be telling the tales of those hours when I am an old man. Many laughs and many adventures and more than a few different accents. Woke up on somebody's lawn, peeled myself from the grass and staggered home... two houses away. Almost made it. Family dinner Thursday night for my great friend. He is the pride of his Whanau, and deservedly so. I don't know many people of his ilk, and I doubt I ever will.

Friday morning rolled around too quickly for his family. The airport departure lounge was awash with the tears of those who were losing their loved ones - perhaps only temporarily, or perhaps forever. Took me spinning back three years to the gates where I parted with my love for nine months. Awoke old feelings in me that I scarcely remembered I had. I pushed them away, buried them deep down, because this was about my friend and not me. Looked around and saw many men and boys crying openly into the necks of their loved ones and felt a supreme lack of love in my own life.

Airports are houses of emotion more than anything, I think. Departure lounges strewn with parents, siblings, lovers and losers parting ways with one another. Facing the prospect of walking to the car alone, driving home alone, and sleeping alone in a bed without their love beside them. And the arrival gates heaped with smiles and relief and gratitude and aching, aching love for those returning to their lives.

If my life was an airport, I would only have a departure lounge.

My boy walked through the security check and out of our lives for now. We (his mother, brother, aunties, cousins and I) went upstairs to watch him walk through the duty-free area and to his gate. I stood with his four year old brother on my shoulders and said, "There goes your brother... you'll be a big boy when you see him next," to which he replied, with typical four year old logic, "Yes, and I'll be at school with a teacher." Some events are bigger on the scale than others for children.

And so he was gone. His family were lost at sea, swirled by the waters and churned by the whirlpools. Their anchor had been pulled and they were adrift. I held his little brother's hand across the carpark, strapped him into the back seat and got behind the wheel. I drove his mother to a decrepit liquor store in Manurewa so she could buy something to drink. The next three hours she cried for her boy and I drove home in stony silence. Life is a series of losses, and this one was a tough one for my boy's mother. If I were a more eloquent and sensitive person, I would have known the words to console her. As it stands, I blurted a few clumsy lines about how he would be back before she knew it, and turned the stereo up. Thankfully she was in the mood for loud music.

I arrived home to a radiant day. There were patches of autumnal cloud hanging in clumps on the blue background, like pimples on an otherwise perfect face. The sun shone in a show of benevolent force, sending the lake into one of its shimmering dances. The wind moved across its surface like the lips of a lover across the skin of her soul mate. I kissed the wind through the open window as we weaved through the city; tasted the sulphur in the air and thanked a faceless deity for leading me back home. The rat-race of the large cities is not for me. Dropped my boy's mother with her nieces and nephews to drink their sorrows away and went to my brother's flat.

The weekend stepped past me. Almost like it crossed the road to avoid me coming the opposite way. But it came sprinkled with the hundreds-and-thousands sweetness of word from my long lost American patient. We talked and laughed. I am glad to have her presence around again. Success, you pixie, is only a matter of time. I'm your big neon sign, so don't you forget it.

In the intervening days since, I have done little except write and sing. These are my favourite ways to spend my waking hours. I have been getting more sleep, but only in short bursts at all kinds of strange hours. I am less despairing about this than I have been. I think I can survive it. And so we are caught up. There is much I have left out in terms of detail, but these last five or six days, I believe, are for those who were there, and not for public consumption. Ask no questions, hear no lies.

Who is your favourite person in the world beginning with S?