Long haul

“No sugar, no cream, just black please”. Again, filter coffee and a dark night, with only sixty-five metres of metallic wingspan separating the living from the dead. Despite all my accumulated hours in the air, it still happens that I am struck by my own mortality up here – especially when I think about all the happiness I have come to feel, the sheer marvellousness 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 finally 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 on Kurfürstenstraße in Berlin; or a simple morning with Danish yoghurt and Special K in Seoul. Cheap aesthetics of the frequent flyer, one may say – but it is a playfulness I am willing to defend. I want the world to be at once boundless and familiar, the journey 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 with every passing day, I realize more clearly how important it was for me to be able to make that choice.

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