Erling does not move as I rest my head on his shoulder. I wait a moment before moving it away again, making sure that the change of posture seems casual, not too quick. I tell myself that we are both tired. Everything will be better once we are on the bus that will take us home. It is now delayed by another 30 minutes, the timetable announces as it shines down upon us.
The dusty blue sky is darkening behind the metallic buildings towering over the station, with pieces of color captured in the window grids. Platform indicators glow through the evening air. Despite being so tired that every fiber of my clothing stings against my skin, I am overwhelmed by the view. I am about to say something about it to Erling. Not the view itself, necessarily, but perhaps something simple about beautiful things, and about ordinariness. Then I think: Maybe later.
“Oh, thank God,” I say instead when the bus finally rolls in. Erling quietly takes off his backpack to retrieve his passport. The driver gets off the bus and shoos off somebody who is trying to board. “Not yet!” Frustrated groans fill the platform.
“Shall we sit upstairs?” I ask when we are allowed to board.
“Fine.”
“Or we can sit downstairs, if you’d…”
“I said it’s fine.” I climb the stairs after him to the bus’s second floor, feeling heat rise in my eyes. When I get in the seat, I try to sink further down, to let my body drown in the cushion. The creases in my jeans cut into the back of my legs. Erling pulls up his laptop and opens Outlook. The bus rocks like a clumsy animal as it exits the terminal. As we leave the concrete buildings behind, I put on my headphones and start a playlist. A girl starts singing about a night shift.
Cargo trucks drive past us in the other lane. Catching glimpses of the drivers’ faces through the window, I think about how they have traveled this route hundreds of times. About how they will probably drive the same route in the opposite direction tomorrow.
***
I was not as well-traveled as Erling and had never been in Amsterdam before. Walking beside him, I restrained myself from commenting on bikers effortlessly gliding through the streets between trams and cars, lights shimmering underneath bridges, the entire little lives buzzing at the edge of every canal. Instead, I just quietly tried to let the city permeate me, hoping to stay in the state it put me in for as long as possible.
“I sometimes wonder what I would have become if I never met you,” I said during our first evening in Amsterdam. We sat at an outdoor area of a wine bar, our table shaded by a massive tree. The thought had just popped up right there, right then, as I looked at his large hand cupping his chin, a strand of hair touching the upper rim of his glasses.
“Same. I also sometimes wonder what you would have become. Makes me shudder.” I laughed, and he touched the tip of my nose, a habit of his.
I met Erling at the beginning of the first year of my master’s degree. He was finishing up his thesis at that point. It was he who made me apply for the temporary part-time research assistant position at the faculty, “with the possibility of extension”. Recommended me to someone he had a good rapport with, even. After getting the job, I signed up for a subscription to The New Yorker and started buying Korean skincare products in minimalist, elegant packaging. Erling, now graduated, still held on to the project-based data analysis job he had while studying. A few times I told him I had heard of engineers struggling to find proper full-time jobs these days, to which he replied, “Nothing.”
The perk of his job was that he could work from anywhere with a Wi-Fi connection, which meant he could travel without actually taking time off. This also explained why, during the day, he would tense up at me whenever I pointed at a funny ad poster. During our first night in Amsterdam, I woke up to him sitting in bed, his face lit up by the sharp light from his laptop. I asked what he was doing as I sat up, shielding my eyes. It was 01.36 in the morning, the watch on my wrist said.
“I seriously need to get some stuff done. Got nothing done in the day.”
“You will get sick like this.”
His eyes were fixed on the screen as he scrolled down. “I just cannot get laid off now, that’s all. You do understand that?”
“For Christ’s sake, they won’t lay you off.”
“You sound very sure, considering…”
Right before the summer, I found out that my contract with the faculty would not be renewed. They “unfortunately would not be able to renew it.” Something with budget revisions. I did not read the email very thoroughly. I had not yet canceled the New Yorker subscription.
“Well, thank you.”
“Sorry.” He took a strand of hair that hung down in my face and put it behind my ear. Said sorry again.
“It’s ok.” I put my hand against his cheek. The skin was a little uneven, rough patches here and there. “If you want to catch up on your stuff, I could just go out by myself tomorrow.”
“Stop it. We are traveling together, aren’t we?”
“If you can’t sleep anyway…” I pressed my lips against his shoulder, where it was not covered by his T-shirt.
“Get some sleep, Irma. I’ll put down the laptop, ok?”
“Ok.” Feeling the sheet bunched up beneath me, I tried to let my mind drift off to the sounds of traffic and the vague chatter outside. I was supposed to let myself float off with it, become one with the city, now that I had the chance.
When we sat in a small, dimly lit restaurant the next evening, Erling stole a chunk of my tofu with his chopsticks and told me my blouse was cute. The streets outside were wet; electrical wires stretched above them, dripping. Light spilled onto the pavement from the shops and offices housed in century-old buildings. I told him about an article I had read about how tourism was pushing locals out of the center of Amsterdam, with social media turning neighborhoods into attractions.
“Are you not part of the whole problem though, if you travel here having an active Instagram account?”
“Yeah, obviously.” I took a sip from my water glass. “But like… it is pretty much impossible to opt out of certain things. It’s like this ecosystem. That we have to take part in, to exist at all.”
Erling took a mouthful of kimchi. “I suppose.”
“Or do you think you are? Opting out of the system?”
“Never said I did.” He turned to look out the window, his attention seemingly captured by something I did not notice. My hand hung in the air, the chopsticks pointing in separate directions, as I waited for him to comment on whatever he saw.
***
Most passengers are asleep as the bus rolls quietly. A few phone screens shine in the dark. Someone in the rows behind us clears their throat, and I become acutely aware of the air’s dryness. I dig around in my bag for my water bottle, but it seems to be stuck underneath a sweater, tangled with a charger that is hooked onto something else at the very bottom. Something sharp cuts into my cuticle. I curse and give up. I straighten up and look out the window, past Erling. He turns his head, seeing my face turned towards him. My fussing must have woken him up.
“What is it?”
“No, nothing,” I whisper, shaking my head and smiling reassuringly. “I just couldn’t fall asleep, and then I…”
“Ok.” He closes his eyes and turns to the window again.
We stop in a small town whose name I cannot find anywhere. The empty bus shelter is filled with a white light. Inside it, a scrolling poster shifts from an ad for a soda flavor to one for a streaming service, switching back and forth for whoever would see it at this hour. A man with a dog on a leash appears from the city park behind the bus stop just before we start rolling again.
Some of the nameless, quiet towns we drive through look like arrangements of blandly colored cubes; others are composed of ornamented classical buildings, cobblestone squares with statues in front of the bus stations. I think about people walking home through the streets or finishing a late-night project in apartment complexes. Someone having a health scare, someone contemplating quitting their job. I wonder if they ever ask themselves how they ended up here, how they themselves and their lives had become what they had become? Would anyone ever picture my life when passing through my city? Would it become something anyone would want to touch with their imagination?
***
Erling had wanted to see some friends and have a bit of a change of scene this summer. Digital nomadism had also been buzzing in the discourse of his social circles, so bringing his job along for a multi-city tour felt like a logical decision. We decided that I would tag along back in April, on one late night at his apartment. It would be perfect. I would be off work for the summer and done with my classes. I would also be unemployed, but I did not know that at that point. Lying next to him that night, I thought of the things we would see together, about how this would be the starting point of my life, the version of it that would be worth telling about.
Traveling in July was, of course, signing up to be chased by a heat wave. On the train to Prague, I sat blank-eyed, feeling a surface of sweat and dust form on my face. Somewhere in the wagon, someone opened a can of baby food. The odor immediately began swirling in the stale air, mixing with the smell of the warm moquette seats and the thick, metallic fumes from the gangway.
“Have you asked?” It took me a second to register what Erling was on about. “Why did they not continue the contract?”
“It was about the budget. They wrote that in the email.”
“I know they wrote that, but have you asked them if there was some other reason?”
“What other reason?”
He lifted his hand in a frustrated gesture. “I cannot know that.”
“You mean I should ask if it was because I was useless?”
“Obviously, that is not what I…”
“Ok, then why should I write to them and be like, ‘Hey, how’s it going? Oh, by the way, was there some other reason than the one that you spelled out, in written form, black on white…”
“Christ’s sake, Irma, fine.”
I ran my finger along the edge of a laminated brochure for a membership program with the train company, thinking about the pack of cookies I had bought at a small shop near the station. I had pictured ripping the plastic wrapping and reaching it out to Erling. Us talking about the news, or an album released by an artist we both listened to. Now I pictured the package, the swirly font and colorful berries on it, tossed in the trash.
A moment later: “Have you looked at those jobs at the student information center?” There were some postings of administrative positions on campus, now that the fall semester was slowly approaching.
“I feel like I have not really had time for it. Everything is just so up in the air.”
“What is up in the air?”
I turned my head back, glaring at someone watching a video without headphones. “Everything, I just said.”
“At some point you need to…”
Something wanted to be pulled up through my gut. Maybe it was the smell of the baby food, or maybe the uneven, swinging motions of the train. I folded my arms on the flip-down table and put my head down on them.
“Yeah, ok. I just… You just have all this potential, and… whatever.” Hearing his voice above me, I imagined something slimy crawling over my skin, making me want to dig my nails into it.
It was easier to go with the train’s motion with my face buried in my elbow. Thoughts began warping into each other like images in a kaleidoscope. ‘He should not have brought you along. Such a waste,’ was one of them, as clear and piercing as the light coming through the stained train window.
When I straightened up, feeling crumpled up and greasy, I saw the back of Erling’s head, his face turned to the window. The curtain was drawn back, framing the yellow fields racing by. I thought of taking a picture of him, to detach the moment from anything before and after. Then he turned.
“You slept?” he asked.
“A little. Kind of. I was motion sick.”
“Oh. Feeling better?”
“I think. Yeah.”
Our days in Prague I recalled through the haze of blazing heat, which left us slow and quiet, sweat soaking into our clothes and then drying up in them. Tourists flocked to one of the central squares to get a shot of the astronomical clock on the town hall. Crowds gathered in front of stalls selling ice cream in chimney-shaped pastries. I had seen countless Instagram posts of them when browsing before the trip, held up in front of pastel-colored, ornamented buildings. In the evenings, when the temperature became bearable, we went to a pub not far from our Airbnb. We sat outside, with a view of the Vltava River and the shimmering city reflected in the water. Erling took a picture of me there one evening. In it, my eyes were lowered to my phone, my hair and the side of my face glowed from the red lamp above. I jokingly said I looked like someone brought along on a holiday by their more well-established partner.
“It will work out for you, you know,” he said with a tight-lipped smile, fiddling with the sleeve of my jacket.
On our last day in town, we visited the Cold War museum, located in a bunker beneath an old luxury hotel. I had mentioned wanting to visit it already before the trip, and that I wanted Erling with me. Down in the old nuclear shelter, the guide talked about the periods of paranoia and oppression, the uprising back in the 60s, and how it was cracked down upon.
I recalled Erling standing next to me only when I heard him asking, in a whisper, how long I thought there would be left of the tour. “It’s so stuffy down here,” he said. Which it was. The air clung like a sticky film to my face as we stood there, 20 people in a narrow room, looking at propaganda posters and objects gathered from rooms in which people had been interrogated and threatened. I could feel the pressure from the layers of the city above as I listened to the stories, so similar to the ones I had heard fragments of my entire life.
“If you want to, you can leave,” I whispered. “I want to stick around till the end of the tour. Go to a café and get some work done, or something.”
“I will stay if you stay,” he whispered back. I held out my water bottle to him, and he shook his head.
When we came up on the street again, the sun was bouncing off the pavement, white and blazing. “That was… I am glad we went,” I said. Erling wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
I picked up my phone to search for nearby cafés. He was already walking down the street when I looked up. He was exhausted. I wished I had let him stay behind. A tourist bumped into me with her bag as I stood in the middle of the pavement. Erling turned his head, his expression confused, impatient. No, it was he who should not have brought me along, I thought, feeling the burning sun on my skin, wide awake this time. What a waste.
***
I am shaken into consciousness by the feeling of the bus tumbling off the road, of us being flung into an abyss, further and further into nothingness where up and down become indistinguishable, and then I open my eyes and jolt upright. As I look at the tiny lamps in the ceiling, air fills my lungs over and over. On the other side of the aisle, a woman is scrolling through short videos on her phone. She glances over at me, and I quickly turn away, still feeling my heart pound in my chest.
One side of Erling’s forehead is pressed against the windowpane. It does not look very comfortable. I think that I should try moving his head, so that his neck will not be killing him in the morning, but I am afraid I will wake him up. I lay my head back onto the seat, looking at his sleeping face. The buses are built to carry people safely from city to city, to drive hundreds of miles. Of course, nothing terrible would happen.
Outside the window, the world has gone pitch black. The only things visible beside the darkness are some little, faraway lights, seemingly pulled backward, the only sign that we are moving. The only sign of the world still being out there, for that matter, windmills, tele-towers, whatever they are, standing on an invisible horizon. I could wake Erling up and say: “Look where we are!” He would look at me with confused eyes, and I would giggle and say, “We are in the actual middle of nowhere. Look out the window!” I imagine him saying something like, “Holy shit, we are! What the hell are those?” as he peeks into the void outside and tries to Google an answer to what the tiny lights are. Or he would say: “Irma, seriously,” and close his eyes again. I stretch my legs out as far as they go, feeling like the inside of them is about to coagulate.
I need to sleep, at least a little. But every time I close my eyes, I feel the bus getting slung off the road; it spins till it hits the ground like a piece of gravel, the engine catches fire, the flames come closer, and then they are everywhere, and then I am torn awake, and my only thought is that I need to stay awake so that we remain on the road.
***
On our first day in Berlin, I went out and walked without consciously choosing a direction. I boarded a tram and rode a few stops, then walked more. The streets were wide and open, breathing between the concrete blocks, the theatres and cathedrals reaching towards the skies with their peaks and domes. I eventually found myself on a stretched-out grassland surrounded by trees, the TV tower rising behind them. I sat down on my cardigan on the grass, yellowed from the July heat. I leaned back with my palms on the ground, tilting my head up to the sky. Tonight we were meeting two of Erling’s friends from his exchange semester. Tomorrow night, our journey home would begin, after which I would have to start considering my thesis topic and properly look at jobs. I suddenly felt a nausea similar to the one I had felt on the train to Prague, even though nothing was carrying me anywhere.
The warm air got trapped under the layered, grey mass of clouds, bearing down on me. Somewhere in the city surrounding the grassy plain was the hotel where Erling sat with his laptop. He was unaware of where I was among the parks and bus stops and coffee chains, unaware of me quietly facing the thought that I might never make enough money just to feel safe. That I might never have people in my life who would want to hear the silly things that came to my mind. If I could stay here, I thought, instead of returning to the hotel and getting ready. If I could walk into the city. Keep walking, getting giddier with every step, and then, and then… I didn’t know. The city felt like it might never end.
A few meters away, a group sat on a blanket, drinking beers. One girl in a square-neck tank top said something and the rest of them laughed. Another threw herself back onto the blanket, spreading her arms, facing the clouds.
Erlings friends, John and Celine, were two expats living in a small apartment a few subway stops away from our hotel. In the narrow hallway, Erling’s hand briefly touched my shoulder blade as he passed me by, while I took off my sneakers and shook hands with Celine. She told me my tote bag was cute as I settled it next to my shoes.
“Oh, look, he brought what was promised. It’s the Irma. In flesh,” John said, peeking out behind her.
“I suppose it is,” Erling replied.
We were in their kitchen, mostly. There was an espresso machine on a metal grid shelf, a monstera plant on top of the fridge, its leaves rocking over the sink. I felt a bit tuned down as I stood at the kitchen counter, chopping vegetables with Celine. I smiled and said the apartment was pretty, but I asked them nothing about it and did not point out anything I noticed. Quietly, I thought about how this was what a life out of reach for me looked like. Now and then I took a sip from a wine glass, from a bottle Celine shared with me because neither of the guys liked red wine. John kept showing Erling something on his phone as they sat on the windowsill. A playlist of soft indie songs played on Celine’s speaker. An alarming, coral tint of evening sun settled on the wall of another apartment building visible through the window. The elusive, dewy scent of lilacs drifted in from somewhere, vaguely clinging to the air.
«What sort of weird route were you guys taking, though?” Celine asked when we mentioned that we had started our journey in Amsterdam.
“Oh, you know, the scenic route,” I said, sliding chopped paprika into the stew we — mostly Celine — were making. “We flew there,” I then clarified.
“Irma knows all about scenic routes. Had a few of them herself.” Erling said.
“Scenic routes are the best routes,” I replied, putting on a made-up accent I couldn’t place, not feeling particularly amused by myself. Erling made a familiar expression that was not quite an eye roll, not even something that could be pointed out as such. More like a blink, and then as if something slightly above his head had caught his gaze for a split second.
Celine made a cheering gesture with her glass. “To more scenic routes!”
“Might be the last one, for all I know.”
“Is the world ending, or something?” John asked.
“I am graduating next year. You are kind of tied up after that, aren’t you? If you even get a proper job. Feels like my last kick or something.”
“Yeah, I felt like that too. It’s different. I suppose you learn how to function around it. Sounds tragic, but…” Celine looked up from the stew and smiled. “What have you been doing for your last kick, then?”
I shrugged. “Just sitting and reading in cafes. Listening to these Spotify playlists on trains. Small stuff like that. Gone to some museums.” Having chopped everything Celine had delegated to me, I leaned awkwardly backward onto the kitchen counter and took another sip of wine, feeling it settle in my blood. My head and hands felt light, like balloons attached to my body on thin strings. Like they would rise and keep rising into the air, if I let them.
John hopped off the windowsill and walked over to the fridge to get more beers. “Museums. That’s wild. Crazy lifestyle. Erling could use some museums though.”
Erling’s face darted up upon hearing his own name, pulled from whatever had distracted him on his phone. “What.” The word was not a question. He was wide-eyed, lips slightly parted. I suddenly wanted to walk over to him and touch his cheek.
“No, I just said I dragged you out now and then, so that you would get to see at least something on your trip. Someone had to do it.”
“You signed up for that obligation, I’m afraid,” said John. He waved a beer can at me. I shrugged and reached for it, even though my glass was not yet finished.
“Well, one of us has unlimited free time,” Erling replied.
John glanced into the corner of the room with what looked like mock awkwardness.
“I got laid off. My fancy student job could not afford to keep me anymore. So, there’s that,” I said.
“Oh, sucks,” John replied. “Well, cheers to having time to read in cafes.”
“Looking at the bright side. At least I am holding off becoming clinically burned until I am fully employed,” I said, tilting my head onto my shoulder and turning towards Erling.
Erling tilted his head to the other side and smiled. “I think I will be fine.”
“Of course you will,” I replied, smiling back. “With your networking skills, and your resume, and all the important people who adore you.”
He let out a short, bursting laugh. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“What it sounds like. Hardly material for a philosophical analysis.”
“To be fair, he is hardly a philosopher,” John commented.
“That’s what you have Irma for. A carry-on philosopher. Social commentary included. Isn’t that right?” Erling cracked the beer can open and raised it at me. The playlist went silent for a second before switching to a new song. One I had listened to a lot lately but never heard in public. I would have said something about it, had it started playing a few minutes earlier.
“Well, you are the one of us who does everything right all the time. What matters is, your life will turn out just perfect, because you don’t pay attention to any nonsense, ever.” The words were out there, in the damp air before I was even aware of them. I found myself with a grin growing stale on my face.
The saucepan started bubbling. Celine hurried around me to reduce the heat. John patted Erling on the back and said: “We are all very proud of your networking skills here. Let’s set the table. The girls made all the food by themselves. Embarrassing!” As the others went around me, retrieving plates and glasses, I downed the rest of my wine. A little red pool remained in the bottom of the glass, sliding from side to side as I tilted it.
After dinner, Erling and John went out on the tiny balcony for a smoke. Celine found me in the kitchen, washing the saucepan. “Girl! John can take care of that.” I continued the circular motions with the brush and continued to breathe while Celine poured the remaining wine into two glasses and handed one to me. It was as lukewarm as the dishwater in the saucepan by now, but it still burned nicely against the back of my throat. She leaned back onto the fridge, a monstera leaf right above her head.
“Cheers, then. For the final kick.” She said.
“Yep. Cheers.”
“It’s going to… You will sort it out. You will do interesting things. You will get an interesting job.” She shrugged and shook her head.
“Hard to imagine that last one.”
“Ok, fine, a tolerable one then. I actually feel like I am having a blast right now. I don’t know how long it is going to last, fuck knows, but I do fun stuff in the evenings, weekends, you know.”
“Like what?” I smiled, taking a sip from my wine glass, feeling the corner of my mouth twitch. “Tell me something fun you have done lately.”
“We went to Amsterdam for a weekend last month to see a concert. John and I. We got so wasted we got lost. Going to Prague with some friends in September. Oh, you guys were there earlier! Did you like it?”
“It was very beautiful. Crowded right now, though. We went to the Cold War Museum. I really wanted to see it, because…”
The balcony door opened with a slight screech, and a gush of air, slowly cooling, flowed into the room. “We should get going,” Erling said as he walked in. He took my cardigan, which hung on the back of a chair, and handed it to me.
“Your friends were sweet,” I said, walking beside him back to the subway.
“It’s nice you had fun.”
“We should see them again. If we come back.”
“I am not even sure how long they are going to stay here, to be honest.”
A carrier for a food delivery company whooshed past us on a bike, the logo on his thermal bag large enough to be noticed in the blink of an eye. Music played somewhere with steady beats. City lights floating into each other, detaching from their indistinguishable sources. I was struck by a feeling similar to the one I had earlier in the park. I felt the enormity of the city spreading out around me, as if to disappear into it. Away from anyone talking about my potential. The silly crap I had said in the apartment.
Erling nodded towards the corner we needed to round to get to the subway.
“I know the road,” I said.
“Impressive.”
“I was put on this earth to impress you, after all.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“What it sounds like.”
I could just run. He would not catch up with me. He would be too flabbergasted to even try.
The sentiment, or yearning, or impulse, whatever it was, disappeared as quickly as it came.
***
I must have fallen asleep after all. I open my eyes to pale light filling the bus. Grains of dust glisten as they swirl in the air. We are in Denmark, a road sign reveals. Last stop before home. The fields flying past us are endless and moist. It must have rained.
I open my bag again, and this time manage to retrieve the bottle. Underneath it, the crumpled pack of cookies. Despite the water being lukewarm, I lean back and let myself feel my body soaking it up. The vegetation outside the window grows sparser, and then, suddenly, the shore appears. Milky grey sky caught in the quiet water surface. Small banks of sand emerge from the shallow seawater, with patches of grass on top gently swaying. Someone in front of us lifts their phone to capture the view.
Erlings’ sleeping face is peaceful. The skin of his eyelids looks tender, as if it could break from the lightest touch, shimmering with a thin film of sweat. If I gently touch his cheek now, he will wake up. I could lean my head onto his chest, and we could look out the window together. Maybe my eyes would well up with tears from the breathtaking view. Maybe I would say something about beautiful things, about ordinariness. Maybe he would run his finger through my hair. The moment might be one motion away. But I don’t move.
Maybe in the next second, I will. But then it passes, and I don’t. I remain as I was the moment before, looking out the window, watching the coastline flash by, watching it grow thinner and thinner.
