My Best Holidays Ever

This is my reply to a blog challenge to write a travel post which I just discovered. I wrote the text a while ago for a workshop, however, so it’s not originally a blog text - but I figured it would still do for my first response to such a challenge. Enjoy!

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In Holland, I fall off a bike and all the way down from a bunk bed onto a bast rug. The first gets me bloody knees and squeezes grit deeply into my palms, the second earns me an abraded cheek and a concussion. In Finland, older kids yell “Heil Hitler” at noncomprehending 9-year-old me and my younger sister in a row boat on a peaceful lake. Some years later, on another cargo ship trip to the land of a thousand lakes, a stupid man interprets my dislike of butter as premature dieting and talks about me above my head. I refuse any further communication with him, even though he tries really hard to talk to me. Sitting on a dry round rock with my journal, I evaluate all my body parts and really like none. Adults embarrass me by just existing, and no one finds the right words to coax me out of my cocoon.

Exchanged to a place called Market Rasen that nobody has ever heard of. The greyish pulp called Shepherd’s Pie, lunch boxes with vinegar crisps, and school uniforms we don’t have to wear - it’s a world I don’t understand and which nobody explains. I try my usual escape into a book, but all I find is fancy pictures of frosted cakes in cookbooks I don’t understand, either. London blurs past in another one and a half days and leaves me with the vague memory of waxen celebrities I don’t care for and about two thirds of the secret of Michael J. Fox’s success. Two teenaged sisters who agree even less than cats and dogs are perfectly able to ruin a long summer holiday in beautiful Brittany for the whole family. I write all my hate down for my best friend in a book with a frog on the cover and carry it everywhere I go so my sister can’t read it. This is the last time our family goes on a holiday together.

Swarms of wasps gather around my best friends green Berliner Weisse. We suffer from disorientation and a very long way to walk with our rucksacks, tent, sleeping bags, clothes, snacks, travel journal, and whatever else we consider bare necessities. Free and outside, music festivals all over the place. I roll cigarette over cigarette, don’t get enough food but drink beer instead and hope for kisses. He doesn’t love me back but still shares his car and coffee with me. I find out what boys talk about when the girls who are still around don’t matter. It’s not nice. A little later, I’m in Berlin, city of arrogance, where everyone pretends the tiny town they came from has never existed in their lives. I still seriously consider moving there. Ignorance is a taboo, so I shut up and drink some more beer or take another hit off a joint. Nobody seems to miss me in their conversations.

Holland with a group of friends, where our car is broken into and my Jimmy Somerville/Army of Lovers tape is stolen. I overdose on skunk in a coffee shop and fear I might fall into one of the canals. Another unhappy love lets me rub her belly in the backseat when I’m lucky. It’s rainy, and we all need more space than we get. I go on another holiday with other friends, who are eager to try out their Spanish and consider translating for me too time-consuming and inconvenient. In bright daylight in Basque Donostia/San Sebastián, we have to pass police with machine guns on our way to the historical city center. One night, a crowd of people suddenly pushes into the tiny bistro we’re in; and I already see blood on the floor. I am afraid to show my tattoos and cover up my green hair with a constant cap. The crime novel that’s set in Barcelona lies about the layout of the city; and the Sagrada Família is covered up for renovations. I desperately look out for lesbians, to no avail. At night, I stay in our room to draw the horrors around me with one failing felt tip pen after another instead of going out.

Even in the Queer Mecca, freaks are murdered in public. My menu here mainly consists of peanut butter sandwiches with strawberry jam, flavor enhanced Top Ramen instant soups, and the occasional spaghetti dinner I am invited to. A major fashion crisis erupts when I am completely misread by the people who matter; I realize that what formerly was screaming obviousness has turned into utter moderateness with my change of continent. Being white suddenly places me in a completely new minority, and I learn to step out of men’s ways all over again. At cash registers, I’m repeatedly startled to be addressed by the name on my traveler’s checks. Feeling inbetween tourist and temporary immigrant, I never know what to answer when they ask me what I do here. Shyness rushes back over me in surges and keeps me too tangled up in my worries to enjoy all the seductive offers this city makes.

Was this my first migraine? I only remember lying on a sofa drifting in and out of consciousness, stabbing pains, and a madly spiralling blur of memories questions worries fears flashing inside my head. I have a nearly speechless crush on someone like me that consists mainly of long looks, deep admiration, and mapless touches. Two weeks before I have to leave, I watch someone else smash glass on a night street, want to lick the blood of her finger, and fall in love with crooked teeth, scarred flesh and someone far out of my league. Once again, words fail me, although I cut and paste enough of them onto a page of newspaper to make her cry in front of me. I know we are far too different to have a future together. I am too rich, she doesn’t know enough, but really it is the other way round.

It’s Amsterdam where on two days in a row I get the most painful tattoo ever. I hide that I’m German, speak English only, and cling to my hosts like poison ivy. Fast forward to Berlin again, to conferences and more migraines; public sex, power play, and queer humanities. We’re always late, the subway costs a fortune, and I start losing a friend there. Amsterdam, part two. Someone tries to pick me up next to a pool table by showing me how egocentric she is and how little I interest her. I’m too sober to be flattered. From someone else, I get a kiss I have long longed for. It certainly hasn’t been worth the wait.

Pardon my French, but non, je ne regrette rien.

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EDIT #2: I didn’t hand in the text after all, so back here it is.

EDIT #1: Almost right after posting it, I had to take this story down again. I intend to hand it in as my submission for a writers’ competition (for non-native speakers who write in English) which I discovered just now. My apologies to everyone who followed a link and ended up in unexpected territory.

I promise, I will write and put up more stuff in English - and leave it here. Soon.

Until then and instead of words: a picture from a holiday not mentioned in the original story. Enjoy!

“Pretending to be alone”