I stand there, staring at her. She paws through my belongings, I can do nothing to stop her. Something is wrong. This is why she pulled me aside just now, asked me if she could go though my personal belongings. Her authority is total.
She pauses, maybe an eyebrow arches, maybe my anxious brain is making that up. “Traveling alone?” she asks as she holds up a bottle, peers closer at the ounce capacity. “Yeah, it’s my first trip to Europe!” I start in on my oft-told story: “You see, I couldn’t fly for quite awhile…” I trail off, my face goes red. The bottle the TSA agent is holding up is the lube I brought in my shaving kit.
I think of making a joke, because of course I do. “Haha, that’s for brushing my teeth with” No, that won’t fly, no pun intended. “That’s for butt stuff!” Honesty is the best policy, right? Instead, I just stare at a really interesting spot on my duffle bag, I notice something on it that I need to get off, maybe that doesn’t actually exist.
“Have a fun trip”, she smiles and puts the bottle and my shaving kit back into my luggage. “Thanks I will” I respond through thin lips.
At the gate I can hardly contain myself: I’m going to Europe! I didn’t travel overseas after college like so many people do, and then I developed a debilitating fear of flying that meant I could go only as far away from LA as I could drive or train. While this sounds charming and like a quirky personality trait, it was embarrassing.
My first attempt to overcome it was being overprescribed for an important work trip in 2010. I took Klonopin, a popular elephant tranquilizer, and lost a day of my life on the plane to the work conference in Florida. I hear I was the life of the party on the long plane ride there, and also susceptible to answering any questions asked of me absolutely and painfully truthful.
Since then, I downgraded to something milder, which I was presently breaking in half and popping in my mouth on my way to my gate. I looked ahead: there’s Nick!
Nick works for an airline in customer service, which means he has a high bullshit tolerance. We met through Instagram shortly after I moved to Portland, and he’s been there for me though my triumphs and my tragedies, in particular my breakup from David a few years back (the guy that eventually inspired my Box Wine Boyfriend).
Nick wishes me bon voyage and then I’m on the plane. I feel like everything is new, I feel like I have already shown my passport to 100 people, I look out the window and the plane is so high I swear we’ve taken off already. Remember this feeling, Mike, I think. You feel young again.
The plane ride is delightful and feels bizarrely short. One of the movies I watch is “Mortal Engines”, a blockbuster adaptation of a novel by Philip Reeve. The film features a massive, post-apocalyptic version of London that is literally on massive treads and rolls around devouring smaller cities. As we’re descending into London Heathrow, I imagine even the clouds look different, like clouds in a Studio Ghibli film. When they break, however, the city is sadly not on wheels.
“Do you have anything to declare?” the agent asks before letting me through, stamping my passport and another paper seemingly dozens of times.
“Uh just my emotional baggage” I offer helpfully. He does not smile.
I left the afternoon before, and it’s morning the next day now. I make a beeline for the nearest coffee shop.
“Iced coffee please.”
“An iced latte?”
“No just iced coffee, light ice.”
“Iced…americano?”
I have failed the first test. Countries that doesn’t have iced coffee are …homophobic, yes? Anyway, I finish my iced coffee and carry the empty container for awhile: there are no trash cans, er, rubbish bins anywhere to be seen.
I get on the tube. It’s crowded and I make my way into the train car just before the doors close. I’m used to the light rail in Portland and New York though, not the rounded corners of the London Tube, so the doors clobber me in my stupid American head. People politely pretend not to notice. I don’t drop my empty coffee cup, so there’s that.
The tube is alarmingly fast, and so are the escalators: they must be gay. I arrive to my station and go to the surface. I just sit awhile and let the sounds and the conversations of the city wash over me. British people sound like Americans making fun of British people. Yes, I realize this makes me sound exactly as untravelled and world-ignorant as I think it does.
London is ancient, London is beautiful, the overly polite citizens remind me of Portland and I already miss my cat. Walking along the South Bank with my friend Stefano reminds me of other cities’ waterfronts, sure, but this is different. You know Bizarro Superman? The Superman that is so similar to our caped hero but he’s from another dimension and he’s angular and when he speaks, things are just…different? London is Bizarro New York.
I’m walking to scout a colorful wall a couple days after my arrival. The street is narrow and full of old buildings with shops, and it’s barely drizzling. I am happy and curious and feel incredibly lucky to be there, but also there’s an undercurrent of loneliness. Suddenly, I’m thinking of David again. I imagine that he comes around the corner, that we run into each other on another continent. He and I have exchanged texts perhaps twice since the breakup at the end of 2015, but this feeling is so strong and surreal that I literally brace myself to see him. Over the next couple blocks, I slowly relax. As far as I know, he’s never been to Europe, it’s just my brain chemistry playing tricks on me. In any case, I am still holding that iced americano container from days before: where are the trash cans?
After a few days, I take the Eurostar to Paris. And by take it, I mean I miss my train completely and have to take a later one. My friend Anton who I met last year in Portland (he was also in my engagement shoot with my “fiancée”) is now in Paris, and he shows me around, apologizes for the trash everywhere in the streets. See, it’s May Day, and the only municipal workers working that day are the police who are busy with the Yellow Vest protests.
The Yellow Vests are protesting income inequality, but the problem is that a lot of people living in the city of Paris can afford to be living in the city of Paris, so they don’t really see the point of the protests. Having just come from London, I saw parallels between what was happening there with Brexit and the anti-immigrant impetus behind it, and what was happening back home in the U.S. with anti-immigrant prejudice and racism…and saw the class inequality protests flanking this too. I ask Anton to take me to the protests. He smiles his most polite smile and does not take me to them.
The message comes after I post something on social media seeking help for a photo from any Parisian friends. “Hey, what a world of coincidence- I just got back from Europe!” I am completely unsurprised to see that it’s from David. We exchange pleasantries, which is what we always do when we text each other. “Hey, we should get together the next time you’re in New York and catch up”, he proposes.
I look at the message, hopeful, confused. Does this means he wants to patch things up? Maybe even date again? These are the backflips and contortions my brain goes through every time I hear from him. This is what happens when something good was interrupted and you don’t know why. This is what happens when someone is the love of your life, but you are not the love of theirs. I start typing my reply.
There is a serene, symmetrical beauty about the farm fields you fly into when you land at the Malpensa airport near Milan. The fact that you have to take a train kilometers into the city is icing on the cake. My friend Emanuel meets me at the train station and we trek to his place. It’s in a charming building with a stone courtyard. The large wooden door must be decades old, he opens the small door set into it- and I promptly hit my head so hard on it that I see stars. Twinkling, bright, Italian stars.
We run into a friend of Emanuele’s and join them for dinner at a Nepalese restaurant. Towards the end of our meal, the servers start breaking into a Neapolitan song and the restaurant erupts in claps and sings along to “O Surdato ‘Nnammurato”. I clap along, I am dizzy with happiness. Or maybe that’s the concussion from hitting my head two more times over the course of my trip to Europe: old Europe was made for people much shorter than me.
On the plane, I don’t watch anything, I just think about the people I met and my friends already there. To end my trip, I stayed a couple days with my friend Danielle, who lives outside London near quaint villages and verdant green countryside. It was a calm coda to the urban whirlwind that I just got whisked through. I finally found a rubbish bin to throw the coffee cup in.
The clouds, white marshmallows with almost cartoonishly flat bottoms, part, and there it is, my city I love: Portland. I unbuckle my seatbelt, stretch my legs, and trot towards the back of the plane. The flight attendants up ahead in the back galley see me, smile, one leans into the door and pulls the lever of the emergency exit. We are so low that it doesn’t depressurize the plane and I reach the door at a full run, leap out of the plane. Above me, the door shuts and the attendants wave goodbye to me through the window.
I stretch my arms as I dive through the clouds, they smell slightly sweet and feel like diving through feathers. My city opens up under me, there’s downtown, there are the bridges across the Willamette, there’s Forest Park, I can smell the sap in the trees. I look to the eastside and there is my building, if I squint I can just make out my Russian Blue cat Ned. He is hungry.
I descend faster and faster, the trees rush up to embrace me, I am in the earth, I am under my city, the worms are delighted as they eat me whole, I become the rich loamy soil, I love you, the moss grows into my mouth, I love you, I am so full of love for you.