2024: diary of a girl in her 20s

03.29 The Cairo's Cross Weekend

The following morning, Julie and I woke up at around 12.

We had panettone bread with butter, fruit and tea in the kitchen with her sister Lucy, who was moving to France on Sunday.

Julie and I then went for a walk. We ran into Mike, Van and Archer who were very hungover on their way to a chinese restaurant. They told us that they were thinking of going to a refuge house in the woods for the night, and we decided to join them.

Julie and I then took our walk. It was heavily rainy and windy, but we had fun. We walked through the old town and rested at the cafeteria of a beautiful hotel that was in the upper side of town.

Then we crossed the bridge of Saint Thadir and finally walked back home.

At home, Julie cooked a delicious pasta while I read Dubliners for a while.

As we were eating our meal, Mike called Julie, saying that he felt a little sick and asked if he could come over to Julie's to have a nap. Some minutes later he walked in through the kitchen door, said hello to us and went straight to Julie's bedroom. Julie and I took our time to finish lunch and then she went upstairs to nap with Mike and I read in the living room couch and eventually fell asleep aswell.

At 18:00 or so a call from Luke woke us up, telling us to rush, because, if we were going to go to the refuge, it had to be soon. Quickly, Julie and I packed our bags: gloves, a warm sweater, a warm raincoat, toothbrush, a sleeping bag, some water, a book. The three of us left the house and we divided in two groups: Van, Archer and Mike on Archer's father car; Julie, Luke and I on Luke's car. While Archer's group went to buy food to spend the night, we went to Luke's to pack blankets, wood, and cooking essentials.

At 20 approximately we met in Hiza, a town that was near the beginning of the refuge route. We stopped to steal some wood from a ranch and then we began our adventure.

At this point in the weekend, it wasn't raining, but it had been raining all week, and on Monday it had snowed, so you can imagine the state in which the roads were. This didn't stop us from beginning the journey, nor did the rest of the things that happened to us during the following hours.

The trip to the first cabin refuge was okay. No car became stuck in the mud, it simply was a little slippery at times. At 22:30 or so we made it to the refuge, and there was a car parked outside. We had thought of the idea that other people might be there, since it was an open refuge, but we simply thought "who the hell is going to go to the refuge with the roads in this state and the weather under 0 degrees?"

We knocked on the door of the cabin to see who was about. Three 40-something year old men open the door and they soon told us they very high on speed. There was a dog too. The interaction was defenitely the most fun part of the night. One of them was rolling a blunt, the other one took care of the fire, the third one started saying "i've been trying to explain to these guys for the past 2 hours that gender is a construct, but they don't understand me!". We asked the very distressed man how had he been trying to explain that gender is a construct, so he started telling us a story that went like this: "There was a girl -took a breath and looked at us in a very suspicious way- in my hometown. She was named CONVERSION -he gave as a suspicious look this time- and she was VERY tall, and she did things that, well, you know, aren't very girl-ish, such as lifting up VERY HEAVY sacks of flour up her shoulder, to help with her father's bakery, because they had a bakery, you see. and you know, she did, very very strange things, like being VERY tall and VERY strong to help with the flour sacks, that were VERY heavy, and the bakery -he repeated this at least 5 times, as if in a loophole-".

Suddenly he stopped the story and went to talk about 14,000 italians being killed off in the rain today. Of course we were very intrigued by the end of the story, so we asked the man "wait, wait, what happened to Conversion?"

The man suddenly opened his eyes like a mad man and said "Oh, Conversion! You want to know what happened to her!? Well, a flour truck ran her over!"

Everybody started laughing like crazy, and the man kept going with the story.

"And, so, when they took Conversion to the autopsy, they discovered she had a penis! And so, my point is, she was raised like a girl because her parents wanted a girl and everybody thought it was a girl and so it made no difference! Gender is something made up, it has nothing to do with penis or vagina!"

Man, we laughed like crazy. Then these men told us they had an only fans for 1 euro and Mike was trying to convince all of us to put 0.1666666 cents per capita to buy their only fans. Then we saw that these men had weed and we had no weed for the night, so we tried to negotiate a fair trade with them.

They first asked if we had LSD. Luke for some fucking reason had LSD in his bag and we could not stop laughing now. The guys became paranoid and rejected the offer because they were apparently very high on speed already. In the end we traded some bread for a joint and we left that place right after that, laughing like crazy.

This is barely the beginning of the journey. We decided to try a second cabin that was about 15 minutes away by car. 1 whole hour took us to get there. The roads became very watery, we had to cross rivers and exit the car to push the cars several times. In the second cabin therme was also people staying over, in this case, furtive hunters which told us to go away in a quite unpleasant way.

At this time it was 23:45 and we decided to try for a third cabin called The Falcon Nest. Halfway through the road, Archer's car became completely stuck in the rain and it took us one entire hour to get the car out of the road to then keep on driving further up. The bumper of the car broke down and we tried to fix it with some injury bandages and a piece of rope, unsuccessfully. As we were pushing, the car, it also began snowing. Overall it was a very tiring but we were always in a good mood, joking and having some laughs over the situation.

When the two cars finally drove up the road, Luke in the last car, we walked up the hill happily and he started playing Happy Together by The Turtles in the loudspeaker, and we all danced in circle around the car listening to the song as we celebrated that we could keep our neverending journey.

We got to the Falcon Nest, knocked on the door, and some bikers were there about go to sleep. They gave us some water and we talked with them for a while, gave them some directions for their morning biking route, and then left again.

At this point, it was 1am, we said "fuck it, let's go to Archer's dad country side cottage". We got there at 2 am approximately.

We were exhausted but that didn't stop us from making a fire and cooking 4 chickens, 12 chicken wings and 4 eggplants. I found some CD's and a stereo inside the room and I played a good jazz album that played for the whole night. We had dinner inside, drank some beer, smoked the joint that the crazy speed hippies had given us, and then we went to bed to play Michigan to decide who slept on which bed.

Before this, I heard Archer suggest in a jokingly way: "What if the exs sleep together", which meant me with him and Mike with Julie, and then Van and Luke because they remained left. That comment made me think about whether he still would do things such as hooking up with me, which I realistically don't know because it's been a long time since us and we never talked about our "breakup", since it consisted on me leaving for Warsaw and soon beginning to date Cloyd, and him leaving for Berlin and I guess seeing other girls too. There are so many things we have never talked about, which sometimes feel weird when we see each other.

In the end, I slept alone, Mike slept alone, Luke slept alone, and Archer, Van and Julie shared the bed. We went to bed at 4 but I couldn't sleep until 6.