hello Rachel,
did you make it back to the u.s.a. or are you still wandering in scandinavia?
i have an image of you quitting the city life and living as a deer herder.
tell me i’m correct!
~i wrote~
Nigel my old friend! from the train of all trains
guess what? You’re weirdly correct, albeit by a certain stretch of figurativity:
i did get on my flight back to new york, and then i sat at home moping for a couple of days, and then i bought a one-way ticket to copenhagen.
i leave in may, and what i’m reading so far makes me think that denmark may not be the place to try to find work right out of the gate, so the new plan is to wander a little through europe and stop wherever i find gainful employment and a sense of home. do you know anyone who’s hiring herders? doesn’t have to be deer; any ungulate will do.
i am quitting my life for something new in europe.
the one-way ticket is to copenhagen, but i think i will not stay there.
the hope is to get work under the table if not over (visa?), and looking at the little mermaid statue does not present the kind of learning curve i seek in a professional undertaking.
also it’s starting to be baloney that i’m not proficient in a second language, and danish is probably not the one to invest in.
also i have been cold for fifteen years, more or less, since shortly after the arrival of that great letter from princeton, so probably i will make my way south to somewhere sweatier.
somewhere less prevailingly white.
somewhere that it’s okay for me to have a mustache.
Some gross hippies with a snare and an electric guitar and a portable amp in my car of this R train from work made me cry just now
Playing Wagon Wheel, of all things
So I guess we’re entering that phase.
She said,
This is going to sound crazy but … you don’t HAVE to go. You know that, right?
I said,
Have to go where?
If you’re about to say to Europe, don’t even
I feel angry imagining you saying that
It’s
Just
So wrong
She said,
I would like to know why the suggestion of not HAVING to go is so jarring
I said,
It’s about how I desperately want and need to get the fuck out of this life — want-want-want — not a shred of should — and how the way that I make such things happen for myself is to put some logistical thing in place that I believe to be the ultimate authority
