I flew Delta. In March 1996, at the airport in New York, a woman told me: “Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Delta airplanes serve to carry packets of banknotes to Russia and to bring gold back to the U.S.” Over the last twenty years, whenever I flew with Delta I remembered that woman and the Russian gold. I looked around, there were still ashtrays on the back of the aircraft seats, admittedly screwed up so they couldn’t be opened, smoking has been banned for a long time. Judging by the ashtrays, this plane had been flying in the early nineties, maybe even to Moscow.

But the flight from Washington to Phoenix lasted barely four hours. Allowing for the two-hour time difference, it turned out that I had flown west for a little more than an hour (the plane left at 6:00 and landed at 7:20 a.m.). I rarely travel north or south. The journey west can start at night, but for me for some unknown reason it’s connected with the morning. Which means that I always feel that dawn has just broken when I fly toward the west. While moving east is always connected with weariness and I drift off to sleep in my seat in broad daylight, as though it were a night flight. That’s how it is when I travel from the East to the West Coast of America; it’s the same when I fly from America to Sarajevo and back.

Phoenix airport. The first thing I saw when I came into the parking lot was the red bandana around your head.

For the next five days we were going to wander aimlessly along American roads. Wander aimlessly? That means feeling the real proximity of the world and being aware of oneself, of one’s body in space. Back in the nineties, you remember, we drove without a map through the minor country roads of Virginia, with the idea of getting lost, and then searching for a road that would take us home. To wander means to confront a simple, healing truth: the world is bigger than I am! Aimlessness was the only purpose of our journeys, even though we moved farther from home with every second. Although that could be a definition of home, too: it’s always wherever you’re in the company of those closest to you.

A red bandana. My gran, your great-grandmother, used to wear a similar scarf on her head. Hers was white, but it seems to me that it had the same pattern on it as the bandana on my son’s head.