it's the dream i always have: i'm on a plane, high above the clouds. the plane starts to descend, and i have this sudden panic because i just know that i'm on the wrong plane, am traveling to the wrong place. it's never clear where i'm landing—in a war zone, in the midst of an epidemic, in the wrong century—only that it's somewhere i shouldn't be. sometimes i try to ask the person next to me where we are going, but i can never quite see a face, can never quite hear an answer. i wake in a disoriented sweat to the sound of the landing gear dropping, to the echo of my heart beating. it usually takes me a few moments to find my bearings, to locate where it is i am—an apartment in prague, a hostel in cairo—but even once that's been established, the sense of being terminally lost lingers.

accident—how i found her. accident—how i lost her. you have to give the universe credit, the way it evens things out like that.

outside, i was expecting darkness, but, no, it's still daytime. days like these go on for years. it's the ones you want to last that slip away—one, two, three—in seconds.

i didn't come to utrecht for small talk or for soccer or for friendship. i came for paperwork. a quick visit to university college for some papers to get my passport. once i get my that, i'll go back to the travel agent, maybe ask her for a drink this time, and figure out where to go. buy my ticket. maybe take a trip to the hague to pick up some visas, a visit to the travel clinic for some shots. a trip to the flea market for new clothes. a train to the airport. a thorough body search by immigration officials, because a lone man with a one-way ticket is always an object of suspicion. a long flight. jetlag. immigration. customs. and then finally, that first step into a new place, that moment of exhilaration and disorientation, each feeding the other. that moment when anything can happen.

sometimes the wind blows you places you weren't expecting; sometimes it blows you away from those places, too.

they all argue over this and i find myself wishing for the anonymity of the road, where you had no past and no future either, just that one moment in time. and if that moment happened to get sticky or uncomfortable, there was always a train departing to the next moment.

the devastation caught me off guard. there's a difference between losing something you knew you had and losing something you discovered you had. one is a disappointment. the other feels like losing a piece of yourself.

breaking up is not something i've done in a while. so much easier to kiss good-bye and catch a train.

wipe the board clean? i feel like my board is too clean, perpetually wiped bare. what i want is the opposite: a messy scrawl, constellations of indelible things that can't ever be washed away.

i sit at the edge of the fountain and watch people and, for a minute, indulge myself imagining lulu being one of them, imagining that we really had escaped into the wilds of mexico. is this where we'd go? would we sit at a café, our ankles intertwined, our heads close, like that couple over there under the umbrella? would we walk all night, ducking into the alleyways to grab a kiss? would we wake up the next morning, untangle our bodies, pull out a map, close our eyes and decide where to go next? or would we just never get out of bed?

what's the definition of insanity? doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

because i understand all the ways of trying to escape, and sometimes you escape one prison only to find you've built yourself a different one.

i'm not sure it's possible to simultaneously love something and keep it safe. loving someone is such an inherently dangerous act. and yet, love, that's where safety lives.