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.
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
Is there any way I am so lucky as to have the whole row to myself on this overnight flight from Kennedy to Copenhagen?
The cartoon passengers in the Norwegian Air safety video are so white as to arouse my suspicion. Also the oxygen masks in premium seats reportedly require some additional action, some pulling of a cord, that those for economy seats do not. Suffocate the rich? Interesting.
The fat and pale analog humans drinking Coca Cola at eleven thirty at night across the aisle are staring as I swallow the Unisom recommended by my gynecologist in lieu of the Ambien prescription I wanted and the half a Klonopin I found among the dregs of some party past and later on learned how to spell.
Ah, here are my rowmates.
Too bad for me.
Perhaps they will be more tolerable for whatever disposition makes them almost unable to make a flight.
