Day 30

Day 30 –  Dear Readers, forgive my delay. I wrote Day 30 from the airplane and it has taken me a couple of days to settle in here in Berlin. I’ve not been here long, but does that refuse me the right to say I love it here? Because, I do!

I flew from LA to Iceland for a quick layover, then boarded the plane for Berlin. Here is my diary entry:

Day 30 – From the airplane window, I see what is outside at these heights, the big open, split in two at the horizon. The bottom half, an almost perfectly unbroken cloud bank that looks more like a frozen ocean, rippled with the textures snow drifts impart. The top half is an expanse of blue, punctuated by a big round moon. It looked like the size, and color of a new silver dollar, pasted within the frame of this little rectangular window with soft corners. The middle space is hazy orange and pink…

A few minutes later, the pink stretched, pink is leaking from the center. I sit back in my seat with a miniature bottle of white wine I’ve just cracked open and remembered something, but it isn’t a memory from something I’ve seen or done before, but the kind of nostalgia you feel when you’re waiting for it to happen. Every possibility seems as available and familiar as the smell of orange blossoms on hot summer nights in the place I grew up. Something old and new is about to happen. It is right there and it feels like it always has been, like falling in love with a stranger. So you go diving into yourself, probably to the same place where dreams exist, I picture it like a photo I’ve saw of a geothermal bath in Iceland surrounded by snow, steaming from its own warmth. It is called Blue Lagoon and I think that beyond thoughts place I’m talking about should have the same name.

Now, everything outside is purple bleeding into pink, into red, into orange and so on through the rainbow. And as the color that served as night takes over, I feel safe in the airplane going by myself to a country I’ve never seen. Maybe it feels like when I went off to camp, or college, or when I came home from San Francisco, that first year, for the holidays. I will never understand why new experiences feel like old ones and old ones feel new, like falling in love, or, like folding into the bed your mother or sister has made up for you, like when a cat jumps in with you, curling itself into your bent shape, purring, as if to sleep without the warmth of another living thing would cause you to freeze to death during the night.

I am looking forward to the cold. I’m looking forward to seeking out warmth instead of the heat that’s blanked LA. In LA it was starting to feel like there was nothing we could do that would let us throw the blanket off.

So now it is dark out. The plane feels like a submarine swimming through the bluest dark parts of the ocean and the moon is a porch light.