Long haul

“No sugar, no cream, just black please”. Again, filter coffee and a dark night with only 65 meters of metallic wingspan separating the living from the dead. Despite all my accumulated hours in the air, it happens that I am struck by my own mortality up here, especially when I think about all the happiness that I have come to feel, the marvelousness of what is about to happen before the summer is over.

Yet for many hours still, I will remain in this placeless limbo of winding thoughts. As much as the satellite map knows my exact position, I play with images of what the morning will be like when it eventually comes: the sharp bright desert light as I walk naked across a lonely hotel room in North Las Vegas, the green café garden after the rain at Kurfürstenstraße in Berlin, or a simple morning with Danish yoghurt and Special-K cereals in Seoul. Cheap aesthetics of the frequent flyer one may say but it is a playfulness that I am willing to defend. I want the world to be at once boundless and familiar, the journey to be continuous rather than a temporary escape from everyday boredom. Instead of paying for a house, a car or a wide-screen TV, I have chosen this and for every day I realize more and more how important it was for me to be able to make that choice.

I travel to Sweden to marry the woman I love, to have my doctorate conferment ceremony and to see a bit of Skåne in May. I think much travel happens for worse reasons.