excerpts

You begin your journey with your stomach rumbling. Not with hunger, or fear, or excitement for the future that stretches so wide and brilliantly blank before you, but because you ate too much for dinner. The tea was too sweet and you puked twice.

The clock strikes 12:20 and before you know it they are pressing a tin of mints into your hand—in case you still feel like puking they say—and it's time to go. Somewhere across the ocean, your friend is waiting for you to begin the journey, and your family behind you is waiting for it to end. You are caught in between.

Flights are absurd limbos. Sometimes it feels as if the plane isn't moving, like you're caught floating mid air and time doesn't work quite right because the clock ticks forward but the time's all backward. Age doesn't quite catch up with you.

You wake up though to Frank Sinatra crooning in your headphones and the flight attendant asking you if you'd like to have a snack. And it's great. Everything's great. It's 2am, you're watching a movie and eating a salmon sandwich.

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The fields roll by you on the train. Green and wide and endless. You can't help gaping at how much land there is and you wonder if this strange possessiveness you feel for the vast expanse of earth laid out before you is how the colonists felt. It's not yours though, it never will be. This is not your country.

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It's golden hour. You've officially arrived on the first day of summer and the sun only sets at 10pm. The grass is green, the air is cool, and the sun continues to shine for a long, long while.