There’s even a stillness there in my chest. Right at the point where my anxiety lives. That solid blackness that’s always pecking at me, screaming at me from inside—I can’t feel it anymore.

I don’t even know how to get where I’m going, now that we’ve landed. But I don’t care! I can see the mountains that encircle Tirana’s airport, the heat haze that seems so amicable here, the clouds that hang so low, and the palm trees lined up in rows, and everything, everything watches me, protects me.

Thomas and Anette tried their best. They surrounded me like those mountains, they were kind like that haze. But it never reached inside. Into me. To a place that was only mine and that could never belong to them. I feel a little guilty, maybe I should have sent them some message, but there was no other way.

To disappear.

To where I’ve always been on my way.

I don’t understand much of the language that surrounds me, a few words, no context. It doesn’t matter. I recognize it. Mom and Dad spoke like that. And Eliot and Julia. I hear sentences pouring out fast, so fast, and they sound like a song that swells inside me.

The taxi I take from the airport smells like cigarettes, and the fabric of the passenger seat has tiny holes on it. At first I sat down on a bus at the exit to the terminal, right next to a bony old woman. Waited. But it never departed. When I asked the bus driver—who didn’t speak English but who eventually understood—he sketched something on a napkin, which meant that the buses follow no particular schedule, he was just waiting for it to fill up, and that could take a while. So I ended up in a taxi to the train station, which costs much more, and I’m trying to be careful with what I managed to save from my job at the café in Malmö. My wages weren’t great, but the tips were okay, and hopefully it will last me two, maybe three months.There aren’t many train stations in Albania except for the one in Tirana and the one in a city in the north called Shkodër. Three and a half hours to go, just one hundred kilometers. But it’s cheap, costs just under a few hundred lek, and from what I’ve heard it’s fairly comfortable, even though it can get crowded. As if any of that mattered. I’m on my way home. That’s how it feels.

Chapter 31

The landscape reminds me of a film rolling by.

Scenes I could step straight into.

And only then would they become real.