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.

Sophisticate

Most of the people I have met here are fairly worldly. Often they are foreign nationals, they have gone to school abroad, they work for the UN, they spend their summers researching in Africa... it's easy to forget the other half. It's very easy to forget that some of my neighbors have never been so far away as the airport.

Yesterday, I stop into a convenience store. When I space out, as I often do, on the debit card machine, the young man behind the counter asks me where I'm from. I get this a lot. When I say the US, his eyes light up.

"The US!" he says with heavy accent. "I want to go to New York!"
I nod. "New York is great."
"I hear it is big--much bigger than even Copenhagen."
I almost laugh. How would you compare the endless urban landscape of the five boroughs to tiny, genteel Copenhagen? There are more people in New York City than in all of Denmark. "It is bigger, yes."
"I hear that the trains in New York," he continues, making excited gestures now, "travel underground, on top of each other." His tone and expression turn skeptical, so I nod again. "Yes, that's true."
"And they built the tallest building in the 1930s..." I realize he means the Empire State building, which is now, again, the tallest building in NYC.
"Yes."
"Amazing..."

He looks wistfully at some midpoint near the Dorritos, and for all my world-weary condescension, I suddenly remember a 20-year-old me in New York for the first time... I remember how I felt: humbled, scared, exhilarated. I realize that I still feel that way.

"It's very big and very exciting. You should go if you ever have the chance," I say, sad because he probably won't. I turn to leave.
"Yes," he agrees. "Yes, I want to go to New York. And to Detroit City!"

"Um.." Okay, sure. Rock on.

The weird thing is that I have more in common with the guy behind the counter than I do with most of the people I know here. I've been starstruck by Europe. Much like my first trip to New York, I walk around amazed. So different... so old... so beautiful.

I can just imagine this kid hopping up and down in front of the Statue of Liberty, because if I ever get to see the Eiffel Tower, I'm going to pee my pants.