Flights

SEVEN YEARS OF TRIPS

‘Every year we take a trip, we’ve been doing it for seven years, ever since we got married,’ said the young man on the train. He was wearing a long, elegant, black overcoat, and he was carrying a stiff briefcase that looked a little like a fancy container for a set of cutlery.

‘We have tons of pictures,’ he was saying, ‘and we keep them organized. The south of France, Tunisia, Turkey, Italy, Crete, Croatia – even Scandinavia.’ He said they usually looked at the pictures several times: first with their families, then at the office, and then with their friends, and after that the photographs got safely tucked away in plastic folders, like evidence in a detective’s cabinet – evidence that they had been there.

Lost in thought, he gazed out the window at the landscape that seemed to hurry off somewhere. Didn’t he ever think: what does ‘we were there’ really even mean? Where did those two weeks in France go? Those weeks that today can squeeze into just a couple of memories – the sudden onset of hunger by the city’s medieval walls and the twinkling of evening at a café where the roof was covered in grapevines. What happened to Norway? All that’s left is the chill of the water in the lake that endless day, and then the delight of the beer bought just before the shop shut, or the arresting first glimpse of the fjord.

‘The things I’ve seen are mine now,’ the young man, suddenly revived, concluded, slapping his palm down on his thigh.