Both in the car ride up to Maine and the bus ride back to New York, I considered what song could be the theme song for this journey. It may sound strange, but there usually is one particular song that will become connected with that point in time. PortConMaine 2004 was Gravitation music, PortConMaine 2005 was 'Eden' by TO DESTINATION (the opening of Yami no Matsuei), and AnimeBoston 2006 was 'Memories' by Within Temptation.
A theme song isn't something you can decide on ahead of time, as I've learned; certain events happen to make it stick. On the ride up, I was listening to Ayria, E Nomine, and
Lestat. On the bus ride back, I listened to Yuu Yuu Hakusho almost exclusively, plus some .hack//SIGN, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, and the point where I had 'Eden' on repeat for almost twenty minutes. (It was only the TV-size version of 'Eden', too.)
'Memories' became identified with AnimeBoston because that's what I was listening to when I broke down in the bus. This year, I was already a mess when I boarded the bus and the first thing I put on was 'Kiki!', Yuusuke's (purposefully) terrible image song. It's so bad it made me laugh. Which, combined with crying, can be rather awkward while in public and trying to be as unnoticeable as possible.
After twenty minutes of Yuu Yuu Hakusho image songs, I managed to compose myself enough to read more of
Cry To Heaven until I began to get tired with Yuu Yuu Hakusho still playing quietly through my CD player.
It was
Tiamat's 'Cain' of all songs that started the sporadic, short crying stages. 'Cain' isn't a sad song, at least not instrumentally, but the echoing 'If you would be here now' of the chorus was too much.
Over everything, though, the song that carries the memories of this journey the most is
'Hohoemi no Bakudan', the opening of Yuu Yuu Hakusho. We certainly watched enough episodes of it, even if we did usually skip past the opening. But I'm getting ahead of myself . . .
It feels like it's been more than a day and a half. Even in the bus I though that. Weeks that passed by like hours, and then hours that pass by like weeks. Is it already like a dream, hidden away in the deepest crevices of the heart so as to prevent any corruption? I keep expecting to see cats whenever I walk into the kitchen and it's never been as clear to me how different it is to be with loved ones as opposed to being alone.
. . . I'm beginning to think that trying to update at one in the morning was a bad idea; strange thoughts sometimes emerge at night
('window'?) and I'm too tired to properly edit anything.
I was hoping to get a lot more posted today, or at least do a quick entry on Maine pre-PortCon and then start editing photos for uploading. However, there was a
special something that had to be added to my LiveJournal first and it took me much longer than expected to get the coding right on my
profile page. (On the other hand, I now know how to make tables in HTML.)
I'm not quite sure how many posts I'll be making at the moment. Probably one for Maine pre-PortCon, one for PortCon, and between one and four for New Hampshire. What I
do know is that, unlike past years, I won't be making entries in my journal with my photos in them. Like
this. Or
this. Since Yahoo Photos is shutting down, LiveJournal is now my only photo storage place and I don't have to duplicate galleries anymore. As such, I'll just be linking the entries to their corresponding photo galleries. (Another reason why I wasn't able to accomplish as much as planned today was that I realized at Kun's house that a number of photos in scrapbook - including all of the ones from PortCon2005 - hadn't been annotated; I actually just finished going through all of my photo galleries making sure that everything was tagged and titled before starting this entry.)
I have over 200 photos and three videos to upload, plus two weeks of love to type up. Not sure how long it'll take, but I'll try to get all of PortCon done tomorrow.
Many thanks, some tears, the biggest virtual hugs the internet can provide, and much love to Kun and her family, Tomo, Chris, Kelsey, and Shampoo.