January 22

I got my only tattoo when I was 18. I was in Boston for the first time, celebrating New Year's Eve in the North End. It was crazy cold, and we were crazy drunk. Liz, my amazonian friend--who would one day wear bright red dreadlocks and become incapacitated by my gravity bong--convinced me that this was a good idea. A tattoo. She knew what she wanted, was going the next day to get it. Would I come?

So there we were on the northern border of Massachusetts, just far enough into New Hampshire to get legally inked. I picked a design off the wall. It felt like a bee stinging. We walked through the snow giggling, back to a car that would leave us stranded for six hours.

The beginning and the end. That's what I chose. A chinese character in black on the back of my neck. One symbol, two words, everything included.

What I liked about the idea of a tattoo was that it could be an outward sign of inner hurt. I have a four-inch scar on my arm to remind me that I climbed a barbed wire fence. I have dents in my mouth where they took my wisdom teeth. I didn't have anything to mark the day my mother left.

For a long time, I drank margaritas on her birthday. For years I took the day off, the day she died, to ride horses. Because that's what she loved to do. But I've long since stopped celebrating her birthday. And this year, I forgot the day she died.

We had fondue with friends, went to a movie. We came home and drank and listened to classical music. Because that's what we love to do.

When I put my fingers to it, I can feel the faintest rise of the beginning and end on my neck. "They cancel each other out," I used to say. Cancel each other out, as in zero. As in a blank page. Grief can be such a selfish thing that forgetting feels like a triumph. Just another day.

Homecoming

I don't think of Denmark as home. The same way I didn't think of my college town as home, or Boston in the year that I lived there.

But after three weeks away, there was a sense of relief coming back here. Settling. Like an old house. It feels good to settle, to hunker down. I feel, if not at home, more and more entrenched here. I have a residency permit, now. Official permission to reside. They will (hopefully) heal me if I am sick; they will (attempt to) teach me their language. Doors are opening. And like a benevolent, but slightly weary, parent, Denmark is telling me to get a job. Socialism doesn't grow on trees, you know.

But, the impending slog that is jobseeking aside, I am happy to be here. Content, at least, because here there are a lot of very kind people, people I like very much, and in whom I have very little invested. There is no one here whose happiness I agonize about. There is no one here who agonizes over mine.

Release. The burden of love is often too great to shoulder. And I realize that this is rather like a gorgeous women complaining that no one asks for her opinion, but honestly, I need this detachment. I craved it. Distance dulls the pain of the hurts at home; allows me to throw up my hands and say, however little I may have done there, "Well, there's nothing I can do from here."

Peace. The way you can believe peace is possible if you live in Topeka, Kansas rather than, say, Kabul. A very selfish peace. When in doubt, we take the next small step. I need to go to the post office. Practice yoga. Take a walk in the sun.