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.
Iʼll email this guy from college who was Zooey’s roommate our first year in Boston and now lives in Amsterdam
My former coworker Aliscia’s father’s family is in some remote Sicilian village
I remembered last night that a woman I went to kindergarten with married a Spaniard and moved to Sevilla
I’m feeling pretty thoroughly bananas.
What is helping me stay sane and away from that mentality whereby things arenʼt okay unless Iʼve worked out everything for the entirety of my life is imagining that Iʼll spend a few weeks at a stretch in a given place and in each place forge relationships and make discoveries to plan the next place.
Like any version of living, I guess, but in more motion.
She said,
I literally thought you were just going to show up and figure it out.
I said,
Like sit at the arrivals gate at CPH and ask people where they’re going and whether I can come?
Are you seeing people? Organizing your room? Sitting in a cafe? Sending emails? Exploring? Eating vegan currywurst?
I said,
I just got back to the apartment after fucking around in constructive, aid-while-abroad-seeking ways on Facebook for most of the day over two cappuccini and a salad and a piece the vegan bananenbrod with some kind of peanut butter frosting which was EXCELLENT btw at the yes same one not-really-vegan cafe
Trying to make plans for either tonight or tomorrow with the guy who works there, but he is I think Syrian under his German and so his English is pretty confusing
Nursing some confusion about What I Should Be Doing Instead
Feeling almost breathless with loneliness or some other kind of emotional vertigo
In going through my Facebook friends to see whom else I should tag in my latest plea post, I discovered that this guy I had a mad crush on over my years in Boston with whom things never really got off the ground died in a bike accident four years ago
When I think about it I get cold all over
I included him on my get out the vote for Clinton email in November 2016
He’d already been dead for two years
I just redownloaded Tinder, although Iʼm not sure if thatʼs a bad idea or a self-forgiving one
My voice is falling into disuse
She said,
What a swarm of things you must be feeling
I said,
How can you tell?
A guy who was my immediate bestie on our freshman orientation backpacking trip sixteen years ago just wrote back being like Oh yeah I got sick of New York so a friend and I started an investment bank in Bucharest and for sure you can come stay on my pull-out for a couple of weeks let me look at the calendar
And Pavel just messaged that he found me a place to stay on Île d’Oléron, which is evidently an island off the Atlantic coast of France, so now this is thoroughly a fairy tale I am unready for
This is very exciting if I can just figure out how to be scared only a non-crippling amount of the time
I need to go to bed so I can get up and keep trying to move forward in some way even if itʼs not in the BEST way
She said,
Get up and do 10 push-ups first thing
I said,
Okay I will
First I will put on a bra because how I look is the most important thing about me
And then I will do ten pushups
Eleven, even
Itʼs weird how I waited for this for so long and then all of a sudden it happened
WEʼRE ALIVE AND ITʼS SO TERRIBLE BUT THERE IS NO OTHER CHOICE
I said, I need to not just be moldering in this apartment Or this neighborhood, for that matter Manuel has gone again to Copenhagen and so I am charged with making my own plans for at least three days, and anyway when heʼs back so will his actual girlfriend be, too, which will change the shape of our interaction at least some I think Iʼm gonna go on a hike If there is one to be found As soon as my phone is charged Yes I will leave and get lost in the city, and something will happen And whatever it is will be better than this
